xii foresight... is needed now more than ever if nations are to avoid sleepwalking into future situations they would rather avoid.

xii Appreciation, anticipation and learning form a feedback loop that enables foresight to play a fundamental part in human development in every sphere... foresight... is neither forecasting nor prediction nor is it a science, but is a marriage of intuition, substantive knowledge projected into the future and sensitivity to developing trends, issues and events in a symbiogenetic [JLJ - Symbiogenesis refers to the merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism] way.

xii I have spent most of my working life in industry and industrial research.

xiii by 1991 I had worked for five different organisations in 44 years. Consequently, appreciation and anticipation of constantly changing situations have occupied a large part of my thought processes.

xiv I was fortunate enough to create and direct, for five years, a successful international course on foresight. Some of the material in this book comes from that course.

[JLJ - Yes, but did Loveridge have the foresight to see that his foresight course could be used to write a book on Foresight?]

p.3 While foresight is an inherent human activity, conducted both consciously and unconsciously, it appears to be both simple and complex, one of its many paradoxes.

p.7 It is the role of the agile mind to perceive and anticipate future events sometimes correctly... and sometimes to be wrong catastrophically! ...foresight is anticipation and nothing more, but should be informed through systemic thinking

[JLJ - Foresight is an intelligently informed premonition of what might happen (via appreciation) that deserves our present attention, in order to wisely and therefore strategically adjust our current posture and plans, in order to 'go on.']

p.8 Foresight is not new, only newly rediscovered after one of its periodic sojourns in the intellectual and political wilderness.

p.11-37 Chapter 1: Foresight and systems thinking: An appreciation

p.11 The more and deeper you think, the more there seems to be no real 'answer' to a situation. Denis Loveridge 2007

[JLJ - Unless of course the question we ask ourselves in this situation is 'How might I go on?" in which case, we must come up with an 'answer'. A rabbit recently trapped in an outdoor cage, for example, is in a situation, yes, but it is also in a predicament because it has to do something.]

p.11 It is not my intention... to describe methods used in foresight; these are mostly derived from... forecasting, or in modelling systems that have been described elsewhere.

p.12 Foresight is - and remains - essentially practical and qualitative anticipation; there is no comprehensive discussion of it in theoretical terms

[JLJ - Loveridge falls into the trap of looking at foresight in isolation. Practically, foresight can only be looked at in terms of a scheme to 'go on' which calls for foresight in order to strategically form a posture in the present with an adaptive potential that is ready for the future - whatever it is. We can use foresight to construct scenarios of all kinds, but ultimately we must adjust our plans and posture accordingly, in order to 'go on.']

p.12 Numbers invoke notions of precision that are not characteristic of foresight nor of its close relative, forecasting.

p.13-14 Foresight... enables visions of the future... one property a vision must have was neatly summed up by Al Haig, the one-time US Secretary of State, that '...vision without discipline is daydream' (Haig 1984). Foresight is an essential precursor to creating vision and is needed to prevent daydreaming; in that way foresight enables policy to be shaped.

[JLJ - Perhaps we should look at it this way: we daydream all the time, why not focus that effort in a strategic, disciplined way, looking to the signs and cues of what might be that are present or accessible to us, and create from them, using practical and informed scenarios, a useful vision, that we might use practically, in order to better 'go on,' ...?]

p.15 For von Bertalanffy reduction was not a viable way to study living biological phenomena that needed to be set in the context of other phenomena with which they interacted, with increasing complication, and from which they gained their life support.

p.16 Checkland (1981:317) takes these formal descriptions further... when describing a system as a model of a whole entity that ought to relate... to real-world activity that... have emergent properties as a crucial characteristic.

p.18 Multiple single and collective acts of foresight shape the world in which humankind exists... the phenomenon of emergence in which self-organisation plays an immense part... Perhaps this is the real source of Keynes' invisible guiding hand rather than the fateful and insecure one of economics

p.18 Wilson sets out an approach to thinking with concepts (Wilson 1971), an important aspect of any act of anticipation and of systems thinking... An important adjunct to Wilson's ideas is the use of six themes (Social, Technological, Economic, Ecological, Political and Values - acronym STEEPV) that pervade foresight and systems, and place their concepts, facts and values in context.

[JLJ - Ordered Wilson's book... stay tuned for a review...]

p.18-19 Why situations and not problems? ...Situations are neither solvable nor well structured in the manner expected of problem solving. Instead situations can be recognised from their many elements and their interrelatedness, and their apparent lack of structure. Well-specified causal relations may be present, but may not dominate, leaving many interrelationships to depend on the appreciative setting or behavioural pattern... of the appreciator... the insoluble nature of situations means they are dynamic, occur in cascades and are never 'done with' (cf. [JLJ - Latin confer, compare with] problem solving,) but simply change their context and content after every intervention... The emergent properties of each situation will be the input to the next, an ecological phenomenon, each embodying the question of how the interactions of agents in the situation produce an aggregate entity that is more flexible and adaptive than its component agents

p.20 'Situations' is the term I prefer to the 'problems of living' as it conjures in one word the theatrical nature of the problems of living in all their dimensions.

[JLJ - I prefer the term 'predicament' which combines the agent, the environment, the situation, the passage of time by the clashing driving forces, and the fact that the actor is confronted with having to make a contested sequence of decisions on how to 'go on,' as the present moment unfolds into the next, all in one word. This idea came to me after watching the 1914 Charlie Chaplin film "Maybel's Strange Predicament," which was the earliest film that famous actor Chaplin appeared as the "tramp" character.]

p.23 Appreciation, or sensitive awareness, may seem to be an old fashioned idea but understanding what it involves is fundamental to anticipation or foresight. Situations, themselves systems, need appreciation that comes from being open to the reception and interpretation of signals of low probability but with high information content.

p.28 Creation of the future is the intention of any model... Model-making is an intrinsic feature of human cognitive life.

[JLJ - I would say that preparation for the future, whatever it is, and in order to 'go on,' is the intention of manipulating any model. A model is what we play with in order to think.]

p.31 A model of the future is someone's vision of the future... Any model of the future will be synthetic and will have the capability of synthesising many different, but possible futures

p.32 Models of the future (or visions or scenarios) are important because of their potential to disrupt conventional thought processes - indeed it is their purpose.

[JLJ - But then again, models are no crystal ball, and if poorly constructed or manipulated they produce noise or scare-mongering. Ideally, models should produce results which guide conventional thought processes, rather than simply disrupt them.]

p.32 What are the characteristics of credible models of the future? All models of the future encounter the problem of boundary setting, of deciding what is important and what is not, and the interdependencies

p.33 What is embodied in a model is a subset of the perceived future that results from value judgments concerning the part of that future that has been judged important in the context of the situation. In this way a complicated situation is comprehended so that it is judged to be good enough for the outcome(s) to be used... in the battle of ideas... Models of the future will always fail at some point as will any policy... It is better to regard models of the future as idea or possibility machines (Shackle 1952), capable of challenging or breaking established perspectives and modes of thought.

[JLJ - We should never operate at the point where we need to know exactly what will happen. Our models of the future should help us to establish a strategic posture in the present, from which we are capable of doing many things. What emerges from the driving forces perhaps will cause us to intelligently change our posture, but we should have the ability to adapt. We always should have the ability to adapt to what tomorrow brings.]

p.34 Possibilities identified by foresight are important ideas that help to shape models of the future.

p.38-78 Chapter 2: Foresight and systems - epistemology and theory

p.43 The basis of foresight is 'understanding by interpreting the welter of information that bombards the senses; that is a value laden process. Paradoxically then, foresight is not scientific, but determines the directions that science follows' (Loveridge 2001: 782)

p.49 Foresight is about invention, or ideas or hypothesis generation, and is in the nature of a proposition.

p.50 the three characteristics needed for foresight and systems thinking (substantive knowledge, assessing ability and imagination)

p.52 Wherever scenario construction is discussed scenarios are said to be 'logical sequences of events'.

p.56 All foresight and system studies... eventually become political instruments in the process of argument involved in creating policy. At this point, a practitioner's wishes for deeper understanding have to be subsumed into a world that sets different criteria and has less patience. The best the practitioner can do is to infect this different world with the ideas of the nature of opinion, expert or otherwise, so that they spread to influence the use of insights that elicitation and subjective opinion can offer in decision making.

p.59 Sensing the maelstrom of behavioural activity... and anticipating, the act of foresight, its future directions is a form of intelligence gathering... [it] is difficult but highly necessary.

p.61 Intelligence that does not lead to informed action is of little use.

[JLJ - Intelligence that does not lead immediately to informed action can still be held in reserve for possible later action, perhaps when combined with other similar information. For example, a prisoner might know the exact schedule of the guards making rounds, but be unable to use this information right now. Later on, it might be discovered that laundry carts are left unguarded briefly before they are removed from the prison. A shortage of guards on say, Christmas, leads to reduction of inspections on incoming and outgoing vehicles. An improvised escape plan might be assembled from small pieces of intelligence such as these - each of no apparent use on their own.]

p.66 In my view, prioritisation is the bridge between the worlds of foresight of any genus, systems thinking and the political world.

p.67 the aim is to generate a list of technologies critical to the future of the polity... The lists of important technologies produced require a procedure to limit the number of topics to go forward for prioritisation.

p.70 In conclusion, it needs to be said again that prioritisation is the step that links a foresight practitioner's world to their political counterpart's. It is the bridge between the two worlds

p.71 Prioritisation is the least satisfactory part of any institutional Foresight programme; this is the reason for my earlier criticism that it is the point where the whole show can be reduced to a farce... There is a need for serious study of the entire process of prioritisation... this is a place where epistemology has a role to play.

p.72 Major policies are concerned with the maintenance of relations through time, not with once-and-for-all goals

p.73 Many authors have set out to claim that foresight has a theoretical basis, but its artistic heritage means that meeting that claim requires stretching the notion of theory to its limits.

p.79-114 Chapter 3: Institutional foresight: Practice and practicalities

p.80 prediction... implies that a particular event or idea can be identified exactly including when and how it will happen. As there is nothing precise about the future of living systems, predictions are always wrong.

[JLJ - Predictions may be "wrong" but this does not imply that they are not "useful". It might even be "wise" for me, in certain cases, to guide my actions using general purpose predictions about what you will typically do. We should never be in a position where we absolutely have to predict correctly - we should have enough adaptive capacity to handle whatever situation emerges to confront our posture - in our current predicament, and in the next. Prediction should and ought to be used to diagnose the adaptive capacity of our current or planned position in our current predicament, in order to plan our continued maneuvers in the life world, and because we need to decide how to 'go on' at every waking moment.]

p.80 The benefit of foresight takes at least ten years to become obvious and by that time how the benefit was created has often been lost sight of.

p.101 All programmes will produce a mix of intended and unintended outcomes...When foresight is intended to support intervention, the sponsor will require its outcomes to include priority setting... Generally implementation is an Ackoffian mess... a set of interacting problems which in itself is conventionally attacked through the bluntest of tools, prioritisation (Chapter 2).

p.103 Foresight creates controversy - that is its intention.

p.103 In the end, to quote my colleague John Parry, the 'world belongs to practical men and women'.

p.113 Intervention simply refers to activities undertaken in response to the outputs of a foresight study... Concrete outputs refer to... priorities, recommendations, scenarios and written accounts of future trends and issues

p.115-129 Chapter 4: Foresight in industry

p.115 All companies practice foresight, and have always done so... To industry and business... anticipation (or foresight) is the basis of successful continuity and always has been; it is not a newly discovered or optional activity.

p.117 The business world is always disorderly... For this reason, in business, foresight helps to ensure the successful continuity of the business in a disorderly world

p.117-118 the role of foresight should be to identify well ahead of time:

• Possible changes in the business environment
• Things to do and things to avoid...

Through foresight, businesses expect concrete outcomes that can be implemented to create competitive advantage... and through these to contribute toward ensuring successful continuity... foresight in business needs to be concerned with the three 'R's:

• Relevance - the process through which a business relates to the 'world' in which it works and the processes that it uses in its interrelationships
• Reasonableness - the extent to which it is reasonable to extend what is known of that world... into what is likely to become known over any given time horizon
• Robustness - the extent to which alternative courses of action, arising from the above interrelated factors, are: able to withstand the inevitable impact of influences arising in an unknowable future...

[JLJ - Later (see notes for page 174) I add to this list a fourth 'R' - paRanoia. Yes to all the above, but in certain cases we must go beyond even the reasonable, robust, or relevant, for example, when securing a prison or running a nuclear power plant, or designing the nuclear launch codes in the president's 'football,' or designing a rocket to transport humans on a regular basis. Certainly the U.S. space shuttle could have used, in hindsight, a paranoid level of design safety margin. We must be able to stretch and adapt even to the unforeseen and unimaginable, to handle even a perfect storm of events, and this perhaps requires a margin for error beyond anything deemed 'reasonable,' or a 'robustness' deemed acceptable, or a 'relevance' deemed appropriate, to expect. This kind of operating margin, can only appropriately described as paranoid.]

p.120 Foresight has always taken place across all business activity

p.123 Venturing of any form is the physical representation of either individual or collective foresight concluding that a new form of product, process or service presents a business opportunity that ought to be exploited because of its relevance, reasonableness and robustness in its relationship to 'situations'

p.125-127 Much of all foresight... depends on intelligence gathering... Information processed into intelligence begets knowledge... about the world into which businesses are moving... this is a vital resource... Intelligence gathering is fundamental to all foresight... In business, intelligence must turn into action quickly in day-to-day management, but must also build a picture of long-term trends and identification of specific issues that may influence a business's world, all of which will be permeated by uncertainty... Scanning... is a structured, but subjective process of identifying bits of information that, taken out of their immediate context and married with other... bits of information, may be the first weak indication of a change sometime in the future

p.129 The value of foresight is then seen as an enabler to creating a business of the future that has a brisk stride towards a longer term vision that, as far as that is possible, assures successful continuity through helping to secure future profits and alerting companies to new or possible future responsibilities.

p.130-144 Chapter 5: Generalisable outcomes

p.130 However foresight is created, those involved in it pass through processes, either consciously or unconsciously, in forming a product in the form of foresightful ideas with, hopefully, concrete outcomes of benefit to a polity.

[JLJ - There is always the concept of 'low hanging fruit' - 'easy foresight' for example, if we collect the web pages a person typically visits and run them through a statistical algorithm, we can determine products of interest to these people, and produce targeted advertising which will likely lead to increased sales. This 'foresight' does not take rocket science, and is more or less a trick that simply 'works,' that is, until users get smart and install adblocking software. Then you have to block their adblocking software, and then they go elsewhere. Foresight can simply fall back on 'tricks that work,' so long as they continue to 'work.']

p.131 Until computers can 'think for themselves' and interact freely and imaginatively without human intervention or direction, that is live in their own world, the notion of computer-based foresight will remain a trans-humanist dream.

[JLJ - We use computer tools of prediction all the time. The theory here is that the computer must be running a piece of cleverly written code that produces useful insight which can be used as part of a larger scheme. A supermarket might decide to print a 30 cents off coupon in the newspaper, knowing that the typical person that uses it might either 1. buy other items in the store or 2. be new in town and ultimately decide to make the store in question their go-to shopping store. Some might pocket the 30 cents, but in marketing you give up one dollar in order - in the long run - to make two.]

p.131 it has to be remembered that much foresight activity makes no use at all of formal methods, but relies on simple intuition, induction or logical inference to identify important issues and artefacts, some of global importance, others local.

[JLJ - 'artefact' is the British spelling - an 'artifact' of the English nationality of the author.]

p.131 The intention of foresight of any variety is to create change through controversy.

[JLJ - Hence, deserving of our attention, and perhaps causing us to adjust our present posture to a position where we are more likely to be able to adapt to whatever emerges, down the road.]

p.132 Real foresight occurs when a polity is unprepared for what is foreseen.

p.132 foresight is simply expected in the business world, though it is rarely a formally recognised activity.

p.136 foresight and systems thinking in business must be concerned with all those matters that influence a business's successful continuity... For business, foresight and systems thinking are not optional, but are essential for survival

p.139 Appreciation of the situation being confronted and systemic thinking are intertwined; both are concerned with creating a model that sets out the initial perception of the situation and its fuzzy boundaries.

p.140 Grasping the notion of existence is the first essential of systemic thought

p.144 When all is said and done modelling a complex situation of the kind characterised by institutional Foresight in what it attempts, remains elusive but according to Holland (1998) it is not in that category marked 'impossible'.

p.147-168 Chapter 6: Foresight, scenarios and scenario planning

p.147 The core of scenario writing and planning lie in the wide and deep processes described in Chapter 1, in the interlinking of learning, appreciation and anticipation that underlie foresight... Scenario planning's popularity and power lie in its ability to encompass the complexity of the modern world... The underlying principles of scenario planning must concern themselves with:

1. Understanding, as far as possible, those matters that are intangible and subjectively uncertain in relation to the territory of the future
2. Matters that are obvious where uncertainty can be characterised more objectively.

p.148 Scenario building and scenario planning depend on foresight; neither can exist without anticipation of trends, events and discontinuities, the so-called wild card.

p.149 The context of the rise of scenario planning was then the collapse of the pseudo-certainty that had pervaded business and civil society in the two decades immediately after the end of World War II.

p.150 Scenarios offer the planning fraternity the opportunity to include and embrace uncertainty in their thinking; scenarios are thought experiments that enable events and trends that would not otherwise be brought to the surface, to be legitimised... The sense of any scenario must lie in its relevance and reasonableness, the first two of the three 'R's; these bring many other features into play... In any scenario, the inclusion of matters arising from conjecture is clearly a delicate judgement.

p.150-151 any situation is systemic and this has to be characterised through the interrelatedness of all the components; scenarios cannot represent one part of a situation independently from others.

p.151 Scenario writing clearly requires foresightful information or ideas relating to the future that can be synthesized into alternative possibilities for the future.

p.152 Situations occur in cascades, one leading to another... As a result there are multiple boundaries that are themselves not well defined, but are driven by the context and content of each scenario in the multiple set of scenarios... Boundary setting is... a highly subjective matter that depends on the response to the questions Who and what are important to the situations and their cascade?

p.152 Much play is made in scenario planning of causal linkages... Much effort goes into the representaion of mental models through influence diagrams that portray interrelatedness

p.153 in soft systems the behavioural nature of many of the influences means that the interrelationships are qualitative and open to multiple interpretations that can lead to quite different structures, according to the behavioural patterns of the protagonists. Indeed, this is typical of situations... Despite all that is claimed for them, influence diagrams are often expressions of belief rather than of demonstrable logic. With this stricture in mind their usefulness in structuring 'causal' linkages and the general 'shape' of a situation is overwhelming.

p.153 the event strings... are the skeletons of the scenarios themselves, each of which describes a situation and its evolution.

p.153 The learning basis of scanning (for weak signals of change) and of foresight are intended to enable coping with situations as they evolve and to anticipate or shape the way that evolution progresses into the future. Anticipatory learning then needs to have Jones's (1978) characteristics of intelligence gathering and learning leading to the creation of a library of anticipations comprising trends, issues and events relevant to the time horizon of the scenarios. Event strings are composed of anticipations drawn from the library and placed in alternative sets of sequences that, when examined critically, are thought to be free of inconsistencies and impossibilities... The library of anticipations ought to contain entries in all the six themes of the STEEPV set, as any real-world situation will have elements from each theme... The anticipation in the library needs to meet the criteria of relevance, reasonableness and robustness

[JLJ - Yes, but buried in this somewhere are at-core 'tricks that work', where we recognize a situation within a predicament where a 'trick' from our library of tricks 'ought' to work when applied, and we explore diagnostically the situation and the 'trick' as it might practically develop, and how it likely achieves its effect. We cannot usefully construct scenarios outside of our field of expertise, especially where we are competing or attempting to comptete in an environment with experts and their attempts to maneuver for advantage.]

p.154 Intelligence and anticipation from a Jones-based process (1978), emerge from memory, counter-intuitive interpretation of the commonplace, and careful interpretation of the unusual, the unexpected or speculation.

p.155 The outcome of scanning and foresight is subjective opinion

[JLJ - So what? If someone pays you for your subjective opinion, then your scanning and foresight have value.]

p.155 Learning is the basis of scenario construction, but the two processes do not march in step... There should be no doubt about the tight feed-around loop between learning and scenario writing, but the nature of thought experiments requires something to think about first

p.155-156 There is a very large number of discrete ways (scenarios describe them) any situation can evolve, each of which will be only marginally different to its adjacent scenarios. The entire set of scenarios is then a distribution in which each individual scenario has a negligible probability of occurrence. Scenarios constructed for use in planning have then to be regarded as either representing the properties of a known group of scenarios in the entire set... or simply as individual scenarios, of negligible probability of occurrence, from the entire set.

[JLJ - Or, in my opinion, the collective set serves also as a general-purpose guiding mechanism - representing only "typical" futures, the entire set considered intelligently can direct our continued attention to construct the more typical, from the set of generally typical.]

p.157 Conceptual thought, conjecture and opinion lie at the heart of scenario writing.

p.158 The need for scenarios depends on the recognition by an organisation that it faces or is soon likely to face an unfamiliar situation creating uncertainty about its future

p.158-159 In effect, learning about the anticipated situation never ends but a time comes when sufficient foresightful intelligence exists to enable scenario preparation to proceed; clearly this is a matter of judgement that needs to include ways of bringing new intelligence into scenario preparation as it proceeds.

p.159 I make no special claims for the process that is outlined below nor shall I make claims for its successes or failures as I am bound by confidentiality agreements that remain in force.

p.160 The basis of scenario planning is not a matter of technique, but depends on learning, integration and synthesis of alternative futures for the organisation.

p.160-161 Summary: a process of scenario planning

1. Set up a preliminary description of the situation...
2. Establish a broad learning programme... The programme ought to be aimed at creating an appreciation of the situation to enable the boundaries to be derived: these ought to be appropriate to the exploration of the 'territory of the future'. The boundaries of the exploration and the exploration itself, ought to... enable identification of the broad trends that are likely to influence the evolution of the situation...
3. ...make explicit the assumptions that will be used in writing the scenarios...
4. Assemble a set of alternate event strings and trends that will be the skeletons for the scenarios
5. ...write a set of scenarios...
6. Analyse the set of scenarios with particular reference to turning or branch points in the evolution of the situation that may constitute a crisis...
7. From the analysis, derive alternative policies for ameliorating the situation...
8. ...derive alternative, adaptable strategies that are robust in the sense that they will be... Somewhat robust toward the uncertainties likely to be encountered in the territory of the future and able to withstand the impact of their inevitable disturbances over the time horizon
9. By using some form of model, evaluate these strategic alternatives numerically, as far that is possible...

p.161-162 Newspaper headlines... draw attention to a situation, indicating that something has happened but what has happened remains unclear. Despite the lack of clarity the headline description of the situation ought to be sufficient to orient thinking toward broad areas where learning is needed

p.163 It is important to be able to identify the factors that will hardly change at all and those that will change greatly in the chosen time span... interrelationships ought to be very much in mind. Influence or interaction diagrams should be used to plot these interrelationships, enabling them to be revised as learning proceeds, portraying the changing appreciation of the situation as time passes. Development of the possible interrelationships between the constants and the variables revealed by... learning can be done... to create an influence 'map' in which interactions are shown.

p.166 Bringing focus to the learning programmes... is a matter of judgment... It is here that Vickers' notions of appreciation and appreciative setting... , and my own of behavioural pattern... come into play... The circular (or feedback/feed forward) nature of Steps 1-3 and, to some degree, of all those up to step 6 has already been stressed. Learning will affect appreciation of the present, as well as perception and conception of what can be achieved in the future.

[JLJ - Yes, but what exactly is appreciation? Appreciation is simply an experienced-based ability to quickly recognize the driving forces and their typical interaction effects - including overall strength and activity levels - from a strategic or even a systems point of view. Appreciation begins with the intuitive ability to construct simple diagnostic tests from information cues, which lead as quickly to more advanced tests, and soon a broad assessment of the situation emerges from the recognized cues and other 'tricks' that simply 'work,' because we recognize Schutz-wize that we can do them again and again, in this type of situation, which is likely also a predicament. Think of a police officer administering a sobriety test - touching one's nose with closed eyes, or walking a straight line, are simple tricks that diagnose impaired driving. There must be other clever tricks such as these that can filed away for later use, and pulled out at the appropriate time, to diagnose the hidden or potential present in a situation - in other words, to appreciate it.]

p.168 organisations only exist for as long as human societies need them.

[JLJ - ...a lesson for every business.]

p.169-223 Chapter 7: Sustainable world

p.170 The notion of sustainability, the ability to prevent something from failing under stress, seems disarmingly simple.

p.174 Legitimisation is a step toward a change in personal and collective mindset (Chapter 2) that occurs through the inter-working of thought experiments and real world events in the STEEPV set. Sustainability, if it exists at all as a concept and a practical endeavour, requires the triangular interrelatedness between relevance, reasonableness and robustness... the role of foresight is to synthesize possibilities for sustainability... Recognition of a situation in which sustainability might exist, will then need to detect events that arise from the individual strands of the STEEPV set and also from the increasing number of complex interactions between them... It is this staggering complexity that makes sustainability a uniquely difficult situation

[JLJ - In my mind, other than relevance, reasonableness and robustness, there is a fourth 'R' - a degree of paRanoia that also must be addressed for true sustainability. For example, a nuclear power plant must operate at a higher level of preparedness and safety - the chances of an accident are remote but not zero. When designing and launching a rocket, the engineering team must of course first address relevance, reasonableness and robustness, but then must go beyond these basic concepts to eliminate even the remote possibilities of failure.]

p.175 Susan Murcott compiled a list of 57 definitions of sustainability, proposed between 1979 and 1997

[JLJ - From a high level, I would suspect that each definition has something to do with 'going on.' If something is sustainable then it has the ability to more or less 'go on.' So add that definition to the heap. But consider a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Is this act in fact 'sustainable development?' What exactly is sustained? I think that the core of 'sustainable development' must address the concept of an 'entity' in a 'predicament' that must 'decide' how to 'go on.']

p.178 The notion of sustainability seems disarmingly simple but in practice it is slippery.

p.181 Modelling of a situation is an essential part of foresight and systems thinking

p.188 Earlier it was said that that sustainability is 'the ability to prevent something from failing under stress'.

p.190 Science advances through doubt; the time when scientists claimed certainty for their work is long past, if it ever existed except in the media.

p.202 ecosystem resilience prevents total collapse through the remarkable 'safe-fail' phenomenon.

p.203 Human ingenuity alone can achieve a widespread understanding that sustainability and sustainable development are not problems or projects amenable to reductionist thinking leading to a solution and an end point, a trap that many others in the media, politics and elsewhere fall into... They are... dynamic cascades of interdependent situations of ever-shifting character, that emerge from interrelations between the human and natural worlds, in which the absolute dependence of the former on the latter is recognised and acted upon.

p.209 Because the whole panarchy is creative and conserving it helps to clarify sustainability as being the

capacity to create, test and maintain adaptive capability. Development is the process of creating, testing and maintaining opportunity. The phrase that combines the two, 'sustainable development', therefore refers to the goal of fostering adaptive capabilities while simultaneously creating opportunities. It is, therefore, not an oxymoron but a term that describes a logical partnership. (Holling 2001: 399)

p.215 Capra (1996) and Lovelock (2000: 141) invoke the notion of homeorrhesis, the process through which living things 'change while staying the same' (Waddington 1974: 231), as the process through which living systems change dynamically from one stable state to another.

p.220 In this chapter I have endeavoured to illustrate the necessity for systemic thinking and systemic foresight in order to learn the language of cascades of situations in relation to sustainability and sustainable development. In the initial, broad learning about a situation many threads go un-revealed, this comes later during deeper exploration. Throughout, Vickers' (1963) notion of appreciation, with its intonation of complexity and fuzziness, is a powerful one within the limits of bounded rationality. My second purpose in this chapter has been to show that sustainability and sustainable development are far from being short of theoretical bases, but their extreme complexity makes a 'complete' theory nigh on impossible.

[JLJ - In my opinion, managed sustainability hinges on the collection and application of 'tricks that work,' in order to 'go on.' The problem is that this requires 1. an assortment of tricks that work, 2. thought in order to determine which trick to apply, and 3. thought in order to determine when to change tricks.]

p.224-249 Chapter 8: The world of 2030, 2050 and beyond

p.224 Distant horizons are always hazy

p.225 Uncertainty has always accompanied human endeavour... Too often the interworking of the fast, short-term and the slow, long-term situations, as indicated by Gunderson and Holling (2002), are conveniently forgotten or 'overlooked' when credit is sought by dignitaries for this or that 'success'.

p.232 Interdependencies... drive slower moving long-term situations that accumulate the potential to create discontinuities when that potential is released.

p.233 In complex systems the interrelatedness present in a small number of elements can, and does, produce complex emerging patterns of behaviour.

p.237-238 With respect to the core of long duration human needs, the following five characteristics need to be present in each context:

• Interrelatedness at a higher level than the core to allow and create the two-way flow of influence with the core and an influence across the fuzzy boundaries with the 'natural world'
• Time dependence, in that influence and interrelatedness may be present at one time and absent at another: continuous existence is not a necessary condition
• Must be dynamic, exhibiting an ability to behave in a self-organising way...
• An ability to act in a rate controlling manner...
• Protocols to sustain information flow in a systemic manner.

p.243 As always, the 'devil is in the detail' which is why in Chapter 6 (and elsewhere) there has been a strong emphasis on thinking and learning as a precursor to model building to avoid the Wittgenstein trap of formal methods. Model building is the basis on which any explorer, hill walker, mountaineer, businessman or human being, individually and collectively begin to appreciate the difficulties, uncertainties and opportunities in the unknown territory of the future and its terrain, which is only revealed once it is underfoot

p.249 To some people the twenty-first century dream is of immense computational power in machines that may be incredibly small for their power. Even so, the question remains: what will these machines do?

[JLJ - I think Denis Loveridge writing in 2008 would be thunder-struck at the 2018 answer: these machines with 'immense computational power' will operate cell phones which take pictures and send text messages, and perform 'bitcoin mining', and render life-like images in games and movies, and deliver cat and PewDiePie videos, and will in Panopticon-fashion, gather information on who we are and what we do, to deliver targeted advertising. Hollywood stars who have long since died will likely appear in new films. Elvis will likely record new hit singles. Giant networks of such machines will solve difficult problems, such as inventing new drugs, or curing cancer, or play complex games of strategy at a high level. But these machines will use heuristics to become artificially intelligent so we will not have to think anymore. Will mankind be replaced by machines and will we be be relegated to the role we now have for our pets... perhaps the final destiny for man is a creature in some alien zoo, with a sign placed above the cage, 'Do not feed the humans,' that is of course if we as a species do not become extinct...?]

p.250-251 Epilogue

p.250 Foresight, the act of anticipation, is humanity's way of attempting to answer the fascinating and age-old desire to know what the future has in store... Modelling of situations can never be complete because of their dynamism and complexity allied to the influence of H. Simon's principle of bounded rationality. However modelling is an ineluctable and vigorous part of life and foresight that emerges from learning and appreciation. It is situations that foresight must now be concerned with not problems.

p.251 Learning about a situation and appreciation of it lead to modelling it dynamically: that also prevents an early departure into the realm of methods. The latter are mostly derived from technology and other forms of forecasting, that have become associated with foresight. I have referred to this early departure as the 'Wittgensteinian trap' of allowing a fascination for problem-oriented methods to supplant appreciation of the situation much to the detriment of the outcome.

p.251 Throughout I have stressed the importance of situations over problems with their tendency to be seen as 'solvable' rather than part of an ever-changing cascade... existence requires a mindset of appreciation