FS-F01 — Foundations of Futures Studies

What this course is about

Futures studies is not forecasting. It does not claim to know what will happen, and practitioners who make that claim are doing something else. The discipline’s actual purpose is to widen the range of futures an organisation can take seriously, so that it is not caught unprepared by developments it had ruled out without examining them. This foundation course teaches that craft.

How the course is structured

The opening sessions establish why prediction fails in complex systems and what remains possible once that is accepted. Students examine confident past forecasts that proved wrong and identify the structural reasons, which are usually the same reasons: extrapolation from the present, underestimation of second-order effects, and the assumption that current arrangements are natural.

The middle sessions cover method. Environmental scanning and the discipline of noticing weak signals. Trend analysis and its limits. Scenario construction, which is the field’s central technique — building several internally coherent futures rather than one expected future with error bars. Backcasting, which starts from a desired outcome and works backwards to the decisions required now.

Later sessions turn to use. A scenario set that changes no decision has failed. Students produce a short scenario exercise for a real organisation and identify the specific choices it should alter.

What you will be able to do

You should be able to distinguish a trend from a fluctuation, build a small set of coherent and genuinely different scenarios, identify the assumptions an organisation’s current strategy depends on, and present uncertainty to decision-makers without either false confidence or paralysis.

Who it suits

Strategic planners, policy staff working on long-horizon questions, risk managers, organisational leaders responsible for decisions with long consequences, and researchers interested in anticipatory methods. No quantitative background is required.

This course opens the curriculum of the School of Futures & Strategic Foresight and works well alongside the School of Geopolitics for those tracking structural change in international systems. Ongoing analytical output appears through the Intelligence Center; the full catalogue is in the Academy.