In the NIC of Time? Changing Our Minds about Global Foresight

Abstract

The most recent report on global foresight published by the NIC provides an opportunity to reflect on the state of the art in the increasingly competitive and crowded arena of international foresight initiatives and global scenario publications. The NIC report offers scenarios to avoid the extreme reductionism of single line forecasting. The lack of new systemic insights offered by the scenarios may, however, contribute to an implementation gap and a failure to engage, reveal, and test the deeper assumptions about the future that are pivotal in ensuing national security in a multipolar, interdependent world.