Practicing Empowerment Foresight with Our Clients
Empowerment foresight is evo devo foresight. It is foresight that constantly seeks to see and take advantage of both unpredictable and predictable processes of change. It is also exponential foresight, as accelerating change is the most obviously important developmental process affecting our species. Finally, it is progress oriented, seeking protopias, measurably better, measurably more preferred futures, for our clients and our society.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this chapter, much of it still boggy and evidence-weak. But we don’t need to be able to quantitate or prove a process, or even understand its root causes, rules, or constraints, in order to see parts of its predictability. We need merely suspect that it is partly developmental, look for that pattern, and start collecting evidence to validate or refute it, as well as seek to characterize the evolutionary processes that will be used to arrive at developmental outcomes. All of these are necessary steps on the road to continual empowerment of human beings.
We hope this chapter has given you motivation to look for more developmental signal among the evolutionary noise, and to better balance these two fundamental perspectives as you craft strategies, make plans, and execute actions, for yourself and your clients. Please let me know your experiences and insights in that regard, so we can share them in future editions of the Guide.
