An inquiry into my entanglement with corporate foresight – and beyond

In this chapter, I consider corporate foresight in three ways: what it is, what it does, and what it could become, from a situated and partial perspective of a transdisciplinary practitioner and action researcher. I weave my arguments along the following structure: ‘Genealogy of Corporate Foresight’ considers some definitions and frameworks in the field and how they have been shaped in the modern era, alongside other strands, in answer to the question ‘what is corporate foresight?’ Next, ‘The Challenge’ describes the current predicament and what it asks of us, and how corporate foresight might be ambivalent about its purposes and occludent about its roots. This is in answer to the question ‘what does corporate foresight do?’ and presents critiques to chrononormativity by minority groups in the ‘traditions of the oppressed’ who are deemed anachronistic and ‘out of time’ by the temporality of neoliberal progress that reproduces itself. ‘Creative Anticipation’ deepens the inquiry from a post-conventional perspective and asks ‘what could strategic foresight become?’ in second-order, living anticipatory systems. By focusing on the multidimensional, thick present, and situating the foresight practitioner as internal to a collective intelligence system able to reflect and act on the consequences of anticipatory assumptions, creative anticipation opens up potential for generative and acausal shifts in historical patterns by creatively breaking out of the tendency to do more of the same. The text ends with some questions and thoughts in the vast openness and incompleteness by way of a ‘(Non-)conclusion’.