Green Shoots of Strategic Foresight

The U.S. government’s interest in strategic foresight has waxed and waned over the decades, and today there are signs of a renewed interest in exploring alternative futures to make sense of the present. As foresight expert Amy Zalman wrote in 2019, “Foresight activities once again [have] emerged into national security and Federal Government consciousness.”¹ A 2018 study found evidence of strategic foresight at 19 federal agencies:

• Bureau of Prisons (Department of Justice)
• Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (Department of the Interior)
• Central Intelligence Agency
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• Forest Service (Department of Agriculture)
• Government Accountability Office
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency
• National Guard Bureau
• National Intelligence Council
• Office of Management and Budget
• Office of Net Assessment
• Office of Personnel Management
• U.S. Air Force
• U.S. Coast Guard
• U.S. Marine Corps²

However, the fortunes of strategic foresight efforts can shift abruptly, often when an organization’s leadership changes, so some of these programs no longer exist or now find themselves in institutional limbo. For example, the status of the Marine Corps’ Futures Assessment Division, which had produced the creative report Science Fiction Futures: Marine Corps Security Environment Forecast: 2030–2045,³ is now in flux, pending a decision on the future of foresight within the service.

Nevertheless, in the past three to four years, several organizations have started strategic foresight programs or accelerated existing efforts. Drawing principally on interviews with federal officials, this section chronicles the recent history of programs at four federal agencies: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Office of Personnel Management, and the U.S. Secret Service. These snapshots suggest the spread of foresight methods throughout the federal government, but they also show the challenges such efforts face. As Mathew Burrows has written, “Strategic foresight has gained prominence and greater popularity in the U.S. bureaucracy, but, so far, attempts to fully incorporate foresight have failed.”⁴

The CDC Gives Staff the Tools to Explore Futures

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As the nation’s health protection agency, it has a wide array of responsibilities, from combating infectious disease to ensuring occupational safety. The COVID-19 pandemic has naturally focused attention on the agency’s forecasting abilities, particularly Congress’s recent creation of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which will use quantitative models and other epidemiological tools to predict and track disease outbreaks, rapidly providing data to decision-makers.¹⁰ However, the CDC has also been experimenting with foresight. Inspired by the United Kingdom’s use of strategic foresight at the national level and by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s experimentation with the method (see below), the CDC’s Office of the Associate Director for Policy and Strategy (OADPS) initiated an organization-wide effort in 2019 to train personnel in futures methods.¹¹

A real-world example had provided early proof-of-concept. In 2018 and 2019, an increase in head injuries and deaths caused by the growing use of e-scooters took the public health community by surprise, according to a senior OADPS official. The office approached the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, a nonprofit organization representing local health agencies, and in scanning the academic literature and popular media, they discovered that the “weak signals” of e-scooter use—that is, early signs of an incipient trend—were present in 2014, years before e-scooters had become a public health concern. That meant officials had missed an opportunity to stave off the problem before it manifested in visits to the emergency room. This realization prompted OADPS to ask what other topics might catch public health officials off-guard and whether strategic foresight could identify them.¹²

In September 2019, the CDC held an event attended by several hundred staff members, featuring Andy Hines, a strategic foresight expert who runs a certification program at the University of Houston. Hines’ presentation struck a chord with CDC leadership, according to the official, and subsequently, OADPS sponsored an online version of his Houston course for 80 people, including several CDC leaders. (An additional 50 people learned only about “scanning,” which Hines has defined as “an effort to uncover emerging trends and issues that may have important implications” for an organization.¹³) As part of the course, participants identified 10 potential strategic foresight projects the agency could explore, suggesting an opportunity to leverage the method to the CDC’s advantage.

To begin to institutionalize foresight at the CDC, OADPS established a “Strategic Foresight Learning & Action Network,” which began work on two of those projects: one on the future of evidence amid the proliferation of information online, and one on the future of emergency lab preparedness.¹⁴ Throughout the spring and summer of 2021, teams of 10 to 12 staffers met regularly and generated scenarios using the four-archetypes method, a technique by which the future is explored under four general conditions: continuation, collapse, new equilibrium, and transformation.¹⁵ The Center for Preparedness and Response managed the lab-preparedness exercise and, according to the CDC, is already using the results to inform its strategic thinking.¹⁶ Other ongoing foresight projects include a scanning effort to explore the future of agency grantmaking. (The CDC provided $19.5 billion to support public health initiatives last year.¹⁷) The OADPS official noted that the use of strategic foresight is spreading more quickly than expected among CDC offices, which took to the technique once given the language and the tools to think systematically about the future.¹⁸

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Explores the Future of Work

The mission of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is to research worker health and safety and to translate findings into practice.¹⁹ Though both organizations were established in 1970, NIOSH is distinct from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is a regulatory agency.

NIOSH has traditionally been a forward-looking organization, identifying research priorities in 10-year cycles, as reflected in its National Occupational Research Agenda.²⁰ Well before the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated such concerns, NIOSH leaders recognized that the nature of work had been changing radically, requiring new thinking about the best ways to protect employees.²¹ According to one NIOSH official, the institute’s interest in strategic foresight emerged “almost organically” in 2019 as NIOSH was establishing its Future of Work Initiative.²² Around that time, NIOSH Director John Howard also established the Office of Research Integration (ORI) to promote collaboration among and maximize the impact of communities researching occupational safety and health (OSH).²³

ORI became home to a new NIOSH strategic foresight unit, led by the NIOSH associate director for research integration and the ORI deputy director, both of whom completed the University of Houston’s strategic foresight certification course. That unit, in collaboration with internal and external scientists, systematically reviewed future-of-work scenarios in the academic and popular literature, publishing a paper which noted that future workers were likely to face “longstanding hazards in new jobs (e.g., psychosocial stress due to technological displacement); and new hazards in new jobs (e.g., collisions with robots, discriminatory monitoring of workers through wearable sensors, and human-machine role ambiguity).”²⁴ In a subsequent paper, NIOSH officials wrote that many organizations had used scenarios to explore the future of work, but few had focused on strategic foresight’s potential contributions to occupational safety and health: “This future-oriented way of thinking and planning can help OSH professionals more actively anticipate, and even shape, the systems influencing the future of worker safety, health, and well-being.”²⁵

In September 2020, University of Houston instructors conducted an abbreviated virtual version of their strategic foresight training for some 30 NIOSH senior leaders and scientists. ORI then began a pilot exercise whereby a range of subject matter experts constructed scenarios around the future of occupational safety and health. ORI completed those scenarios in September 2021, and according to institute officials, NIOSH plans to publicly disseminate them through presentations and publications, beginning in January 2022. NIOSH has also engaged the University of Houston, the RAND Corporation, and the Oxford Scenarios Programme as collaborators to derive strategic lessons from the scenarios, linking visions of the future to actions the institute might take now.²⁶

ORI hopes to institutionalize foresight efforts and build a more robust organizational ability to explore possible futures and their impacts for occupational safety and health.²⁷ According to Sarah A. Felknor, the NIOSH associate director for research integration, “One of our major objectives is to promote and sustain capacity in foresight at NIOSH…to get us to pivot and think more broadly about what might be coming, and to find a way to systematically organize that information so we can more proactively prepare for the future.”²⁸ ORI aims to create a cadre of foresight supporters within NIOSH. “A year from now, certainly, we hope to have a core group of foresight practitioners at NIOSH who can apply strategic foresight principles to identify strategic options for OSH.”²⁹ At the same time, according to Felknor, NIOSH also hopes to encourage the use of foresight techniques within the broader OSH community and, to that end, is assembling an instructional toolkit for anyone interested in using foresight to advance worker health and safety.³⁰

OPM Shows How Future Thought Can Quickly Influence Present Action

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) created a Foresight and Methods Division in 2014 to monitor topics affecting the future of the federal workforce. But uneven leadership support for foresight and fluctuations in staffing resulted in only fitful efforts, the high point of which was a conference on the future of work that OPM held in 2017.³¹

In 2018, OPM hired its first full-time strategic foresight program analyst to inform strategic planning within OPM and across the federal government. Although his remit is broader, the analyst’s primary task over the past two years has been to lead a foresight project for the U.S. Chief Financial Officers Council (CFOC).³² Congress established the CFOC in 1990 to improve financial management throughout the government.³³ It is chaired by a senior official from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and comprises the chief financial officers of 24 federal agencies, ranging from the Small Business Administration to the Department of Defense. In 2019, with the 30th anniversary of its founding approaching, the group noted that “national and global events, the rapid advancement of technology, and a shift in financial mindset have radically altered how the Federal Government addresses fiscal challenges.”³⁴ The financial management workforce needed the skills to adapt to those changes, and the CFOC needed “a roadmap for navigating an uncertain future.”³⁵

So, working with the OPM analyst, the CFOC developed a set of seven strategies by conducting a scenario exercise based on the University of Houston’s strategic foresight methodology.³⁶ Specifically, it developed a 2×2 matrix to envision four plausible future worlds based on two uncertainties: how the government would collect and use data (efficiently or inefficiently), and how it would implement new technology (slowly or rapidly). This generated a range of futures—from one in which the financial management community leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a world-class data analytics capability, to one in which political appointees did not prioritize technologically modernizing government systems. Working independently, the teams that had built each future world then identified strategic goals, defined as “an insight or course of action that if pursued, would make the FM [financial management] workforce successful in the context of the scenario.”³⁷ The council then identified which goals were most important and actionable.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the White House froze many Trump administration efforts,³⁸ pending review and release of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), an initiative started by President George W. Bush to make government more efficient and effective.³⁹ However, anticipating that the new PMA would likely include efforts to modernize the federal workforce, OMB chartered an executive steering committee to implement the goals that the Workforce Modernization Working Group had identified.⁴⁰ Efforts underway as of this writing include launching a data analytics training program and calling for outside vendors to create a “Career Planning & Training Initiative”—an online portal to enable continuous learning for financial management employees, and (ultimately) all federal employees.⁴¹ OPM’s work with CFOC—much like the Coast Guard’s recent “Pinecone” exercise—shows that it is possible to move quickly from foresight to strategy to implementation, providing a clear example of future thought influencing present-day action.

The U.S. Secret Service Leverages Foresight to Inform Strategy

The U.S. Secret Service (USSS) was founded in 1865 as an arm of the Treasury Department to investigate currency counterfeiting, which was rampant after the Civil War.⁴² It was not until the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 that Congress tasked the Secret Service with protecting the president. Today, the agency, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), continues to investigate financial crimes and to protect political VIPs.

In the early 2010s, several high-profile incidents called into question the Secret Service’s effectiveness, leading to the director’s resignation and multiple audits of the agency’s performance.⁴³ A 2015 bipartisan report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform portrayed the Secret Service as an agency “in crisis,” resistant to change, and beset by personnel shortages, low morale, and poor leadership.⁴⁴ According to a report issued the following year by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), an independent advisory agency established by Congress, the Secret Service had begun to address its shortcomings, including what a DHS panel termed the need for “dynamic leadership that can move the Service forward into a new era and drive change in the organization.”⁴⁵ According to NAPA, one important reform was the establishment of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy to “focus the agency on the mission moving forward as it evolves and needs to respond to new and emerging threats.”⁴⁶ In short, external criticism prompted the agency to consider the longer-term future in a more structured way.

In 2016, the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy reached out to the intelligence community to help it assess the future security and economic environment.⁴⁷ As Gregory Try, then the acting chief for net assessment, explained: “People come up constantly with different ways of harming other individuals. … As we look at the future, those threats are going to continue to evolve. People are going to continue to find different ways of manipulating either environments or the types of tools that could harm somebody.”⁴⁸ Similarly, currency issues have evolved from the counterfeiting of paper money to financial cybercrime. Ultimately, the office produced a strategy document looking 10 years into the future, examining a range of trends, which it presented to the chief strategy officer. According to Try, the document used an analogy to help agency leaders understand the need to continuously anticipate the evolving nature of threats:

When you think about physical protection of people or facilities, you think about it in terms of concentric rings. We built an analogy for strategic foresight that uses the same type of thought process. Essentially, what we did is describe strategic foresight as our outer ring, and then that helped people understand that we were dealing with a time and space challenge.⁴⁹

In 2019, Try, now the organization’s chief strategy officer, hired a strategic foresight specialist and scenario planner to head the Enterprise Strategy Division. The Secret Service now has a speaker series focusing on future trends, such as the metaverse and cryptocurrency, as well as a foresight newsletter, through which it is socializing strategic foresight concepts throughout the organization. It also partnered with the Army Cyber Institute and Arizona State University to host a “threatcasting” event on the future of financial cybercrime.⁵⁰

Most significantly, in October 2021, the Secret Service conducted a scenario-based planning exercise modeled after the Coast Guard’s Project Evergreen, in which it examined four drivers of future change: the USSS budget (abundant vs. insufficient), USSS technology (leading vs. lagging), U.S. privacy concerns (strong vs. weak), and U.S. government effectiveness (high vs. low). By juxtaposing combinations of these drivers, the Secret Service created four possible future worlds, ranging from “A Legacy of Resilience” (in which a post-pandemic United States is thriving economically, socially, and politically) to “Smoke and Mirrors” (in which the United States is politically polarized, economically struggling, and locked in conflicts abroad that undermine law enforcement efforts at home).⁵¹

The Secret Service says it intends to use the results from the scenario-based planning workshop to shape its upcoming strategic plan. According to Try, the long-term thinking done in strategic foresight will feed into the medium-term strategic plan, which in turn informs the annual budgeting process, thereby connecting future anticipation to present action.⁵²