Purpose – This essay aims to introduce horizon scanning as an approach fundamental to most foresight studies. Design/methodology/approach – The essay combines a general review of the topic with an overview of a range of horizon‐scanning approaches that are in use in the UK health system....

When we inhabit time and space, how can foresight be other than a parallax view? Not only is the ground shifting beneath our feet, but our culture colours our perspective. We replace our imagination with computers and program them with data that is often skewed. We begrudge paying our taxes yet...

New technologies are posing new challenges to social science. Their very novelty also challenges the established methods that social research institutions have used to define their priorities. The UK’s Economic and Social research Council (ESRC) confronted these challenges, in part, by...

The world is increasingly complex and the most serious challenges are global in nature. Questions to do with sustainable and equitable development, democratic change, terrorism and transnational crime, for instance, require collaborative action among governments, international organizations,...

The most important results of our recent work, the culmination of a decade of global research involving several thousand managers and professionals from large organisations, are explored in terms of how long‐range planning may be undertaken more effectively by a wider range of organisations....

Speculation, hypothesizing and imagination are the dreamer’s tools. Advanced research and novel technology for the military often profit from what are sometimes unstructured approaches to invention. Once that reality materializes, it may be stranger than the phantasma of the most unleashed of...

In this paper, some of the most important results of the recent work of the author’s Futures Observatory, the culmination of a decade of global research involving several thousand managers and professionals from large organisations, are explored in the context of the long‐range planning...

Poking fun at futurists is not new and so when mainstream journalists deride futures research for being no longer relevant they tend to be dismissed by the futures community as ill informed. But sometimes these accusations hit home and deserve greater reflection and response.