Good Science Project is busily planning its 2026\/2027 programme of Friday Forums. The first Friday Forum, on October 30th, features the Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty, and is called ‘The ethics of air pollution’. It is chaired by Professor Frank Kelly, director of the Environmental Research Group.<\/p>\r\n
For our second Friday Forum, on November 27th, we are happy to be working with Professor Gary Kass (Centre for Environmental Policy) and Dr Owen Jackson (Imperial Policy Forum). Together we are planning a meeting that will get us talking about the ‘futures’ a STEMB institution can help to bring about. Note the plural, ‘futures’. Note also the phrase ‘help to bring about’. Our ‘futures’ Friday Forum is about how we might link agency, to imagination, to the way we currently shape our research. We won’t be doing ‘futurology’ and we’ll be eschewing inevitabilism.<\/p>\r\n
Thanks to Professor Kass for writing this blog, which we can see as a sort of homework for our ‘futures’ Friday Forum<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n Collective flourishing: shaping better futures together<\/strong><\/p>\r\n To achieve just, fair and ecologically robust futures where life on earth thrives, we need active, mutually supportive and equitable collaboration across natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, technology, arts and humanities. We need voices from beyond academia, drawing on perspectives from professional practice, business and civil society in the UK and elsewhere.<\/p>\r\n We need to look beyond current political polarization, and shift the focus from zero-sum thinking and toward the creation of shared public goods that require cooperation across boundaries.<\/p>\r\n As one of the world\u2019s oldest institutions, universities must draw on their histories, mobilise their present-day strengths and take forward responsible research and innovation into the future, shaping policy and decision-making.<\/p>\r\n Imperial College London, as a world-leading STEM and Business university, has a crucial role to play. The Good Science Project is a College-wide initiative aiming to promote debate about contemporary research culture. Among its offerings, the Friday Forums stand out as exemplars of congenial discussion around particular aspects of research culture and provide opportunities for participants to consider wider perspectives on their craft.<\/p>\r\n Our Friday Forum, planned for 27 November 2026, will allow participants to discuss and work collectively on the topic of \u2018Science, Hope and Shaping Futures\u2019. There will be the normal panel discussion, but excitingly we also are planning an afternoon workshop, where participants can sit down and discuss at length how they think Imperial should be deploying its resources, when it comes to bringing about a future we want, or the futures we want.\u00a0 This blog-post helps to set the scene for this event and aims to stimulate wider thinking. What follows draws from earlier conversations in Imperial in the context of an Opportunity Space announced last year (but currently paused) by Aria on the topic of Collective Flourishing (Aria, 2025).<\/p>\r\n \u2018Collective Flourishing\u2019 comprises two integrated parts: Collective \u2013 encompassing all life on Earth, now and in the future, taking a multi-species, more\u2013than-human perspective, recognising the unique contributions of \u2018the collective\u2019 – an emergent property from the inherent complexity of the multitudes of interactions, interdependencies and inter-relationships between individual agents (both human and non-human) operating within highly connected dynamic systems. Flourishing \u2013 enabling life-forms and natural process to occur, regenerate and endure – countering significant human induced threat and stress, from climate and nature breakdown, inequality, resource shortages, ill-health, pollution and conflict, achieving context-sensitive requirements and facilitating plural notions of \u2018the good life\u2019, comprising enduring ecological, social and economic wellbeing, resilience, equity and justice.<\/p>\r\n Moreover, \u2018flourishing\u2019 is a verb, not an adjective or a noun \u2013 it\u2019s about fostering the necessary capabilities for sustainability and enabling generative and regenerative thinking and action. Flourishing is not as an inevitable end-point (or telos, as Aristotle put it), but as a continual unfolding of the good life that looks beyond simple short-term material gain and competitive advantage and requires a whole-systems approach to long-term value and wealth; fulfilling responsibility, exercising care, enhancing agency and adopting alternative perspectives such as \u2018ubuntu\u2019: \u201cI am because we are\u201d.<\/p>\r\n We might recognise \u2018collective flourishing\u2019 as a clear statement of ambition from international efforts to achieve and go beyond the UN 2030 Agenda, to give shape and substance to the 2024 UN Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations (UN, 2024). Commitment and investment in building collective flourishing is a tangible way to \u2018enact the pact\u2019.<\/p>\r\n Our response: we can strengthen\u00a0 capacity through systemic foresight. The 2024 Pact for the Future and Declaration on Future Generations made clear that UN Member States have agreed to enhance capacities in strategic foresight in order to support long-term thinking and policymaking. But, reflecting Sardar\u2019s (2010) notion of \u2018postnormal times\u2019, there is a deeper need to enhance broader capabilities in \u2018systemic foresight\u2019.<\/p>\r\n Building on approaches for anticipatory thinking and foresight practice, and in line with Oosthuizen\u2019s (2024;45) notion of \u201cgrasping the current dance of systems and tuning into the evolving music of the future\u201d, we comprehend systemic foresight as a capability arising from the suite of competencies, capacities and enabling conditions necessary to address an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. This will provide us with a \u201cbeacon guiding us through the uncertain terrains of the 21st century with grace, foresight and profound understanding\u201d (ibid), and to progress towards shaping a world of collective flourishing as individuals, societies, cultures and ecosystems.<\/p>\r\n Systemic is an oft-used but seldom understood word. Put simply, it means explicitly recognising and facing the complexity of the multiple, intersecting and dynamic driving forces shaping our world and generating unpredictable emergent behaviour. It means looking at issues through multiple perspectives and considering multiple spatial and temporal scales across disciplines, institutions and sectors.<\/p>\r\n Foresight is perhaps more familiar, and comprises the competencies and practices for looking ahead, imagining and anticipating how the world might be. Foresight avoids false and spurious claims of precision in forecasting and prediction, and \u2018uses the future\u2019 to both shape societies towards specific goals and prepare for and be able to respond to emergent change. Future-oriented practices are grounded on evidence from history and across cultures but draw on plurality, imagination and creativity to envision and explore multiple futures as spaces of possibility.<\/p>\r\n Systemic foresight and anticipatory practices help to avoid and overcome the comforting illusions of certainty and control, embracing inherent uncertainty and emergence, and embedding these insights into policy and decision-making in the here and now, building capabilities for forging responsible futures.<\/p>\r\n To make progress on the challenge of collective flourishing, we need to advance systemic foresight by bringing systems thinking and futures thinking closer together, pursuing the conditions for just futures. As Oosthuizen puts it \u201cthis synthesis becomes the crucible wherein systems thinking\u2019s intricate grasp of present dynamics melds with strategic foresight\u2019s visionary outlook, giving birth to nuanced, holistic insights that pave the way for informed, agile decision-making in the face of profound uncertainty\u201d (ibid: 44).<\/p>\r\n It\u2019s clear that systemic foresight requires mixed methods approaches, drawing on and drawing together theories, methodologies, tools and techniques from multiple disciplines, traditions and practices based on clearly defined contextually sensitive needs. Systems thinking as \u201ca powerful approach to first improving collective understanding of sustainability challenges\u201d before working \u201cin collaboration with a diverse group of stakeholders and publics, defining desired goals\u201d and \u201cworking together to make them a reality.\u201d (Wan Rosley and Voulvoulis, 2024:1331).<\/p>\r\n Similarly, there is growing recognition of the power of futures thinking, with increasing demands (e.g. from OECD and the UN) for increased capacity in strategic foresight and anticipation. Foresight has a vital role in reframing issues and, as Oosthuizen (2024:41) put it \u201csystems should not merely be analysed as in the case of systems thinking but be visualized from diverse and even seemingly implausible perspectives to truly understand potential alternative future scenarios.\u201d<\/p>\r\n Integrating these capabilities as the bedrock of our approach to responsible research and innovation will further underpin competencies in critical, reflexive, strategic and values (normative) thinking, augmented with advanced forms of inclusion and collaboration to build adaptive, resilient and just transformative futures. This suite of interdependent competencies, working together, is necessary to build and strengthen widespread capabilities to inform and make decisions every day that generate futures enabling collective flourishing for people and planet over the long term, exercising responsibility and care.<\/p>\r\n As an inherently multi-faceted challenge, building systemic foresight for collective flourishing will need to draw on knowledge, skills and ways of thinking and acting from many different fields, from across disciplines, institutions, publics, cultures, and sectors. As such, we might envision a Coalition for Systemic Foresight<\/em>, pulling together expertise, experience and ways of knowing and doing.<\/p>\r\n Such a coalition would work across multiple topic areas, grounded in securing the basics for collective flourishing: self-sustaining life-support systems; fostering positive relationships between humans and the rest of nature; strengthening systems of governance, policy and decision-making to take a joined-up long-term pluralistic perspective, underpinned with new ways to support innovation, education, life-long learning and development enhancing capabilities of individuals, groups, communities and organisations for collective flourishing.<\/p>\r\n A \u2018coalition\u2019 is a \u2018growing together of parts\u2019 and, as such, it would combine and meld experiences in futures and foresight, systems thinking and practice, climate and ecological sciences, mathematical modelling, data science, engineering, medical science, decision-science, business and management, education and learning, sociology, psychology, political science, ethics, science and technology studies, sustainability science, design, arts and creative practice.<\/p>\r\n A Coalition for Systemic Foresight<\/em> would work through co-design and co-production, advancing innovative but effective inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, integrating systems modelling practices with participatory foresight, and embedding within advanced decision-support systems designed to address real-world issues. A Coalition would use such approaches to foster open and constructive dialogue and participatory discourse across society to elicit and understand the wealth of perspectives, insights and ambitions for collective flourishing and build capabilities to develop, integrate, deploy and test advances, innovating powerful synergies between human and technological approaches.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n Knowledge architectures and platforms <\/strong><\/p>\r\n Current architectures for knowledge are not fit for the future and a cyclical and generative analytic-deliberative approach is needed to the creation, sense-making, application and review of knowledges from multiple sources and in multiple forms. This should be driven primarily by situational needs, integrating multiple ways of knowing and countering the undue dominance of existing knowledge hierarchies.<\/p>\r\n In pursuing systemic foresight, it\u2019s worth reflecting on the quotation attributed to Ian E. Wilson (former Chairman of GE) that \u201call your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future\u201d. Thus, while drawing on knowledge, systemic foresight requires \u2018epistemic humility\u2019 in the face of ignorance and narrow predictive power, and demands that we exercise imagination and creativity, recognising both the value and the limits of data-driven and evidence-based approaches \u2013 we cannot know \u2018the future\u2019 but we can anticipate, imagine and sense our ways forward as we shape multiple futures.<\/p>\r\n New approaches to aggregating evidence and sense-making are necessary to address complex, multi-faceted questions, recognising the opportunities and risks of advanced capabilities such as generative and other AI-enabled technologies that can reduce division and avoid alienating minority perspectives (e.g. Tessler, et al, 2024). We also need advances in modelling capabilities to reliably couple bio-physical and socio-economic factors at the system level, dealing with cascading effects over wider spatial and longer temporal scales, and openly addressing uncertainties and inherent value judgements in transparent and constructive ways.<\/p>\r\n The maxim that \u201call models are wrong, but some models can be useful\u201d has never been more appropriate. Again, systemic foresight requires an honest, inclusive and humble approach to developing and applying models of all kinds, ensuring they are \u2018useful\u2019, and not allowing model structures, parameters and boundaries to dominate and overpower pluralist approaches to thinking, creating knowledge and decision-making.<\/p>\r\n Knowledges, beliefs, imaginaries and values<\/strong><\/p>\r\n There are no monopolies in what or how we know the world, what or how we imagine it might be, or in what and how we care about. The techniques for elicitation and developing shared understanding to enable empowerment are continually evolving, and none is perfect for all situations and contexts. Techniques must follow from objectives and should be underpinned by robust theories and methodologies, and be sensitive to plural ways of knowing, avoiding conflating information and meaning. We need, therefore, a clearer and more robust approach to working with multiple methodologies, combining insights from across different techniques and cultures and establishing their credibility, relevance and legitimacy. Envisioning possible futures<\/strong><\/p>\r\n There has been decades-long continual evolution in the many and varied approaches for future-oriented thinking, and while advances continue, they risk getting too far ahead of the \u2018application curve\u2019 and falling into distinct and far-apart methodological silos. We need to ensure that the capabilities in future-oriented thinking are fundamentally embedded within systemic sense-making, pluralistic options appraisal and participatory decision-making; and tied into continuous cycles of foresight-insight-action-learning, drawing on multiple traditions in anticipation, futures studies and foresight practice, underpinned by and embedded within systems-related theories and methods.<\/p>\r\n Traditional forms of future-thinking and decision-making have been dominated by expert-led linear thinking, based on deterministic illusions of predictability and control. Pursing systemic futures requires a diversity of more open, participative and exploratory approaches to looking ahead across broad-scale socio-ecological and socio-technical systems, enhancing capabilities for anticipation, drawing insight from foresight to inform transformative actions in the present.<\/p>\r\n Facing the world as it is (complex and uncertain) not how we would like it to be (simple and certain)<\/strong><\/p>\r\n People are at the heart of decision-making, and we need to foster capabilities for people to recognise, acknowledge and embrace inherent and pervasive uncertainties and complexities, and to respond effectively to the messiness and contingency of the real world. We need diagnostics for understanding issues of interest within specific contexts and to combine and innovate methodologies and methods suitable for those contexts, developing bespoke approaches, not unreflexively reaching for off-the-shelf commoditised \u2018solutions\u2019.<\/p>\r\n We understand both the possibilities and limits of knowledge, of positivist and deterministic science and evidence, and of decision-sciences grounded in rational actor theory. But we need to heed von Hayek\u2019s warning to avoid the \u2018pretence to knowledge.\u2019 (von Hayek, 1974). Systemic foresight requires us to face the inherent limitations of traditional linear, predictive, deterministic approaches with openness and humility. And it requires us to embrace relational thinking and recognise emergence as key underpinnings of how we can know the world. And we need to embrace plural values, beliefs, experiences, worldviews and notions of \u2018the good life\u2019 \u2013 seeing this as inherent and indeed necessary for collective flourishing. As such, we need to find ways to draw on and draw together such perspectives in a whole-system approach, while acknowledging multiple perspectives and strengthening individual and group agency.<\/p>\r\n Education has traditionally focused on building individual capabilities, with an expectation that \u2018collective\u2019 capability will emerge from this. But we recognise the effects of systemic, structural and political forces that constrain (or even act against) such emergence. Systemic foresight requires that we attend to the conditions that enable the capabilities of both individuals and collectives to emerge and find synergy, ensuring the system as a whole can exercise the necessary competencies and capacities for collective flourishing. As Kwamou Eva Feukew (2024: 93) said, \u201cthis is a work for liberation with a strong focus on the agency of the many.\u201d Similarly, \u201canticipation done well can lead to emancipation\u201d (Inayatullah, 2024:112) and systems thinking can help us avoid exclusionary \u201ctraps of conventional thinking \u2013 reductionism and dogmatism\u201d (Reynolds and Holwell, 2010: 303).<\/p>\r\n Taken together, forging a Coalition for Systemic Foresight would advance capabilities towards Collective Flourishing on numerous fronts. We would draw on and draw together experience, expertise and insights from a broad range of domains creating a powerful platform from which to develop, test and deploy enhanced social and technological capabilities to shape generative futures for us all.<\/p>\r\n In facing increasing complexity and uncertainty, Jordi Serra del Pino (2024: 186) made clear that \u201cit is not enough to improve our capacity to perceive reality, to gather empirical evidence of what is happening, if we do not simultaneously increase our capacity to process and grasp this evidence\u201d. In creating shared and plural perspectives, understandings and meanings, and in forging futures for collective flourishing, systemic foresight is an opportunity to build and strengthen \u201cnetworks of becoming, relationality and process\u201d (Fan et al, 2025: 1338). Good Science Project is busily planning its 2026\/2027 programme of Friday Forums. The first Friday Forum, on October 30th, features the Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty, and is called ‘The ethics of air pollution’. It is chaired by Professor Frank Kelly, director of the Environmental Research Group. For our second Friday Forum, on November […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1782,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"yoast_head":"\n
In an age of multiple stresses, tensions and challenges we need to build and strengthen our collective capabilities to choose better futures together.<\/p>\r\n
Collective Flourishing \u2013 Our Understanding<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Building capabilities for systemic foresight<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Possible areas for further exploration:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Synthesising evidence<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Systemic foresight requires imagination and creativity, but beliefs and values shape who we are, how we think and what we do, and they are formed both individually and collectively. Systemic foresight, then, requires a broad and open approach to eliciting and making sense of beliefs and values from across multiple perspectives and ways of knowing, imagining and engaging with the world, acknowledging multiple perspectives, constructing plural forms of knowledge, and supporting policy and decision-making. Modernity has been dominated by narrowly framed ways of being, thinking and doing, dominated by instrumental values \u2013 this has to change.<\/p>\r\n
Ways of thinking, being and doing<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Education and learning need to move beyond individualistic notions of \u2018magnifying the power of one\u2019, to pluralistic notions of \u2018magnifying the power of many\u2019, driving collective capability through enhanced agency of individuals in constructive collaboration. We need to foster capabilities that combine inner and outer-oriented connectedness, where human decision-making draws on a suite of dualities; cognition and instinct; reason and emotion; systematic and systemic thinking; data and creativity; structure and agency; local and global; short and long-term.<\/p>\r\n
Some concluding thoughts<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
References
Aria (2025) Collective Flourishing Opportunity Space https:\/\/aria.org.uk\/opportunity-spaces\/collective-flourishing
Fan, D., Jackson, M. and Zhu, Z (2025). The Future of Systems Thinking. Systems Research and Behavioural Science. Vol 42 Issue 5 pp1337-1338). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/sres.3214
Feukew, K. (2024). A pluriversal definition of Futures Studies: critical futures studies from margin to centre. Chapter 7 in Poli, M. (ed)(2024). Handbook of Futures Studies. Edward Elgar Publishing
Inayatullah, S. (2024). Futures Studies: from perceived injustice to the transformational present. Chapter 8 in Poli, M. (ed)(2024). Handbook of Futures Studies. Edward Elgar Publishing
Oosthuizen, M. (2024). Futures in a dance with systems theory: fields in an overlapping paradigm. Chapter 4 in Poli, M. (ed)(2024). Handbook of Futures Studies. Edward Elgar Publishing
Reynolds, M. and Holwell, S. (2010). Epilogue: Systems Approaches and Systems Practice. Chapter 7 in Holwell, M. and Holwell, S. (2010). Systems Approaches to Managing Change: A practical guide. Springer
Sardar, Z. (2010). Welcome to postnormal times. Futures Volume 42, no.5 June 2010. https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/abs\/pii\/S001632870900202X
Serra del Pino J. (2024). From normal to postnormal futures. Chapter 14 in Poli, M. (ed)(2024). Handbook of Futures Studies. Edward Elgar Publishing
UN (2024). Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact and Declaration on Future Generations. https:\/\/www.un.org\/sites\/un2.un.org\/files\/sotf-pact_for_the_future_adopted.pdf
von Hayek, F. (1974). The Pretence of Knowledge. Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974. https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/economic-sciences\/1974\/hayek\/lecture\/
Wan Rosely, W. and Voulvoulis, N. (2024). System Thinking for Sustainable Water Management: The Use of System Tools in Sustainability Transitions. Water Resources Management (2024) 38:1315\u20131337. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s11269-023-03723-6<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"