Note: For those excited about the “foresight” component of this article, keep reading! The first half deals with the idea of frameworks more generally before addressing how that information dynamically relates to an ever-evolving perspective on the work of foresight.
It seems as if not a day goes by without someone announcing the creation of a new and exciting framework, each with the power to tame every savage beast, enlighten the masses, and harmonize the universe. Of course, I’m only joking — no one has really made such incredible claims about conceptual frameworks that are meant to guide our discovery and development. However, the very fact that frameworks are multiplying like rabbits across industries seems to indicate that the world is quickly morphing in completely unexpected ways, and people are trying to create mental roadmaps and ideological structures that will help us to learn, unlearn and relearn our way into novel futures.
That’s certainly a worthy pursuit; antiquated frameworks of learning and understanding that were created in an era where leaders, managers and individuals were told that the goal was to achieve simplification (and, unbelievably, nobody broke out into hysterical laughter) no longer serve us in a landscape of exponential complexity, shattered silos and constantly emerging realities. (Question: Did models of simplification really serve us in any era, or did they only make us more brittle and set us up for the cascading collapses of broken systems?)
If you’re not familiar with the concept of a framework, it’s really not all that complicated (though some frameworks may themselves be complicated — but that’s the topic for a different article).
In general, a framework is a real or conceptual structure intended to serve as a support or guide for the building of something that expands the structure into something useful; a process and fundamental base of what operating strategies guide a business, organization, or entity.
In other words, frameworks are like maps that aid us in navigating the landscape we’re traversing. That landscape may be as large as a macro system (i.e. national healthcare, digital networks, marine ecosystems) or limited to guiding the understanding or development of something much more localized (i.e. curriculum design, hyperlocal distribution, small-scale chemical reactions). Whatever a particular framework is meant to map, it’s important to remember that frameworks will never be exhaustive descriptors of our exponentially complex universe. As scholar Alfred Korzybski noted in the journal Science and Sanity, “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” This leads us to infer three very important features of useful frameworks (and those who employ them):
- Frameworks do not define a landscape or territory; rather, they give us the tools to explore those landscapes, glean from them, and continually expand or reframe our knowledge of the territory and its boundaries. From this point, it follows that manifestos, platforms, tenets or creeds are NOT frameworks. Those things — lists of principles or ideologies that define a certain perspective or worldview, and that are meant to guide us into a desired state — can be extremely powerful, impactful and important, but they do not act as conceptual structures and pathways that continually unfold, expand or reframe our knowledge of a territory. Manifestos are declarative; useful frameworks allow for and encourage emergence.
- Frameworks must morph and adapt even while they are in the process of granting us greater revelation about the territory for which they are built to examine. Linear frameworks tend to establish the idea of fixed and immovable systems in our minds and in society. Frameworks that acknowledge the emergent novelty of universal complexity help us to continually update, realign and reframe our knowledge of an expanding world full of life and vitality. For this reason, frameworks not only lead us to uncover new knowledge about a territory; the territory alters the framework as we traverse previously unknown features and vistas.
- Frameworks most often represent the context or culture in which they originate, and useful frameworks must purposefully seek to avoid this pitfall. This is an important idea to keep in mind when designing and employing a framework — does it allow for introducing and utilizing multiple “ways of knowing” outside of the environment in which it was created? Can different social and cultural perspectives benefit from the framework, or does it reinforce a “dominant narrative” that intentionally or unintentionally excludes diverse perspectives? Useful frameworks should do more than grow or morph as they reveal a territory; they must also learn to “speak the language” of simultaneous cosmologies in order to view the territory more completely (Here, a study of the philosophy of knowledge rather than the engineering of knowledge is useful for those who are interested.)
With these various aspects of useful frameworks in mind, the rapid accumulation of frameworks in the field of foresight and futures thinking should be utterly unsurprising. After all, if the mountain of new frameworks across disciplines and domains is due to our expanding volatility and uncertainty of emerging novelty that is obviously making old frameworks obsolete, then the creation of frameworks empowering us to navigate those bewildering futures will surely proliferate. And, just as linear and deterministic views of our world are increasingly under fire by academics and practitioners across all domains, so too are the linear frameworks in foresight that suggest that the territory of the future is epistemologically predictive, environmentally reductive, strategically iterative or contextually centralized. Foresight practitioners need to scrutinize how the frameworks they are employing might be reinforcing newtonian, reductive, deterministic and dominant narratives of future territories rather than opening our work to a greater embrace of non-linear, complex, emergent, decentralized, multi-faceted and pluralistic futures. Frameworks that seem to map steps, boxes or axes as a pathway to producing robust futures work should at least make us extremely suspicious. We’ve learn much more about good futures/foresight since many of those “paint-by-numbers” frameworks were first introduced. It’s time for foresight frameworks that are expansive, circular, layered, multilingual, and that embrace complexity.
Over a decade ago, The Futures School developed the Natural Foresight® Framework as a way to discover, explore, map and create foresight work that follows the complexity found in naturally maturing, interconnected and nested ecosystems of emergence. Based on various models of exploring our complex universe such as panarchies, complex adaptive systems, complex responsive process, complex potential states, metamatrices, and evolutionary theories, the NFF is meant to be a living framework that allows the novice to foster rigorous futuring while continually unfolding new layers to seasoned practitioners, revealing the multi-faceted, multi-perspective and multi-dimensional realities in deeper foresight work. NFF is meant to grow alongside its users rather than defining a stagnant set of rules and outcomes, and simultaneously opens up new vistas of sight that linear frameworks are incapable of revealing or examining. As the Natural Foresight® Framework is employed by more organizations and initiatives around the world, new use cases are being uncovered — from bridging the future perspectives of various parties within a country for the cultivation of equitable and elevated social mobility; to creating multi-party vision across an entire region for strategic transformation in business, education and broad-based prosperity; to the shaping of individual and collective meaning-making that allows for greater activation of personal and interpersonal futuring. Echoing Korzybski’s words — that the map is not the territory — we like to say that no framework can demonstrate everything, and all robust frameworks can work together to tell us something useful. In that vein, NFF has been used many times to unlock or “supercharge” other existing frameworks such as those in design thinking, strategy, innovation and, of course, foresight. It’s a framework for an increasingly complex, open and emerging landscape, and we hope that it inspires its users to grasp the novelty and transformation that is rippling across our world — and that we so desperately need to recognize.
If you would like to learn more about the Natural Foresight® Framework, you can download The Guide to the Natural Foresight Framework for free. https://thefuturesschool.com/professional-certification/the-guide-to-the-natural-foresight/
