Resetting Our Future: Learning from Tomorrow: Using Strategic Foresight to Prepare for the Next Big Disruption, reviewed

We look at this new book due out tomorrow by Bart Édes, who looks at how we can try to read future trends, while also being cognisant of the times that we now live in. The book is available from Amazon here.

Resetting Our Future: Learning from Tomorrow: Using Strategic Foresight to Prepare for the Next Big Disruption, reviewed

This book covers fertile territory. Did our future planning scenarios go awry. Or, are black swans, by their very nature, impossible to predict. Global pandemics however perhaps are not coming completely out of left field. After all we had one a hundred years ago, and we also had close misses with Ebola, Sars, Mers, Avian flu, and maybe many more.

In the US you perhaps had the perfect storm of an election in 2016 which elected someone who was very good at doing reality TV, but utterly unsuitable for dealing with complex and challenging global issues. His various approaches including ignoring it, denying it, and belittling those who challenged his views did succeed in creating a completely divided society, and over half a million deaths in his own country, but these are hardly the metrics of success though surely?

This book attempts to lay down a usable road map for how we can deal with the next disruption. Interesting questions to ask would be how did we deal with the current one  we faced. Overall humanity probably dealt with some aspects of it well, but others much less so. Again if we look at the US, serial denial and refusal to engage with the issues resulted in a much, much higher death rate.

Other chaotic regimes, like Brasil for example, as also seeing a raging death rate, far higher than what was necessary due to ego led politics. We mention this because, despite all of the best intentions, humanity itself, and the worst aspects of it, often in the highest positions of leadership, seems almost insanely intent on making the worst possible decisions.

We hope that a book like this can inspire and inform the world to deal with future challenges in a successful and effective way, if only we could just keep the egotistical and self serving individuals away from the levers of power?

More about the book

COVID-19 wrecked the plans and strategies of organizations everywhere, while injecting greater uncertainty into a world already undergoing disruptive social and technological change. Strategic Foresight can help us navigate through the recovery and beyond. Strategic Foresight is a systematic, intelligence-gathering, vision-building process that helps us manage uncertainty by discerning plausible alternative futures and applying the insights to present-day planning.

It is ideally suited to a world upended by the pandemic and rapid transformations in the way we live, work and interact. Using approachable language and a multitude of examples, Learning from Tomorrow shows how Strategic Foresight broadens our perspectives, exposes opportunities and risks, and opens our minds to innovation in a post-pandemic world. It is essential reading for organizational leaders and those responsible for developing strategies, scenarios, policies and plans.

About the Author Bart Édes