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Ethos Issue 7, Jan 2010
Editorial
The future remains humanity’s
most enduring dilemma.
The survival and success—
or failure and decline—of ventures,
organisations and nations have always
depended on how present actions
might be expected to play out down
the road; it is for this reason that those
who govern or lead are tasked with the
responsibility for foresight. After several
decades of consolidated quantitative
control and efficiency gains in public
administration, it has now become
a given in governance to regard the
environment as ever more complex and
turbulent, in which the most carefully
considered policies are subject to the
vagaries of unpredictable forces.
This is partly the result of deeper
learning and also of relative success. The
price of complacency has become much
steeper, while it has become easier to
fall into a false sense of security because
things have been going well. Despite
recent crises, the world has by and large
become less, not more hazardous, than
in the historical past. The advancements
that have made this possible—from maps,
medicine and media
to commuting,
communications, and computers—are
the outcome of an exponential explosion
in our understanding of causes and
effects. Ironically, these technologies
also serve as the medium through
which shockwaves of change can now
resonate well beyond their points
of origin. But by the same measure, our
means to anticipate and prepare for the
future have also grown, assuming we
are inclined to
pay attention.
In Singapore, scenario planning has
been practised at the national level for
over a decade; the expertise driving
its use as a foresight tool has steadily
matured. New platforms and strategies,
such as risk management and horizon scanning, are yielding
promising results. Since the mid-
1990s, the PS21 movement and other
initiatives have advocated a mindset
prepared for continual uncertainty and
change. Given Singapore’s exposure and
constraints, this integrated, disciplined
approach to thinking about our future
is a dire necessity. It is also a strategic
advantage, if it means shifting the
odds in our favour and being able to
compete not on absolute resources, but
on initiative, agility and canny choices
in the face of murky prospects.
Those who consulted the ancient
oracles understood that their fate
was not determined by the auguries
they received, but by how they chose to act upon them. Canada’s
Jocelyne Bourgon seeks a public sector
framework able to achieve superior
collective results, through collaboration,
communal resilience and a capacity to
explore options beyond the predictable. She attributes to government
the mandate and responsibility to take
a broader view of shared problems,
convene interconnecting ideas and
opportunities, and enable synergistic
solutions. This "many helping eyes"
approach to dealing with complexity
may also serve to overcome the
cognitive failures and behavioural
biases highlighted by our Senior
Fellows, Lam Chuan Leong and Gary Klein, who are well
aware of the obstacles that hinder
genuine insight in large organisations.
Forewarned is unfortunately not always
forearmed. Head of Civil Service Peter
Ho has defined concrete steps that the
Public Service should take to anticipate
strategic surprises, and announced
the formation of a Centre for Strategic
Futures.
Pioneering futurist Peter Schwartz
sees in Singapore the potential to be a
global trendsetter and leader in practice, but believes there must first be
a culture willing to embrace diversity,
ambiguity and new ideas. The consensus
is that enlightened, confident leadership
will be needed: to consider a wide
range of data sources and divergent
views; experiment intelligently with
untested ideas; convert foresight into
decisive fore-action; and most critically,
to make corrections when necessary.
The resilience of tomorrow’s societies
will not rest on new technologies
and management techniques, but in
these future-oriented habits of mind,
distributed across a wider and more
connected network.
Other contributors in this issue
suggest developments that may go
against prevailing wisdom; the Strategic
Policy Office highlights possible
discontinuities in the post-crisis global
economy, while the Permanent Secretary
for the Environment and Water Resources
Tan Yong Soon argues that Singapore’s
early foresight and counter-conventional
policies have given it a leading position
in environmental development that may
pay off in a carbon-constrained future.
I wish you a fruitful read.
Alvin Pang
Editor, ETHOS
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