ABSTRACT
Ought the opening quotation be the credo for the marriage of foresight to systemic thinking? However foresight is created, those involved in it pass through processes, either consciously or unconsciously, in forming a product in the form of foresightful ideas with, hopefully, concrete outcomes of benefit to a polity. In this chapter, the possibility of deriving generalisable outcomes from foresight experience and systems thinking, in the form of a process-product net, will be examined. With a large body of empirical studies to draw upon, it might seem obvious that a generalised set of rules could be interpreted as ‘best practice’. Such an outcome is not assumed. So far, foresight activity has paid too little attention to the context in which it takes place and to the integration of its ideas. Instead, foresight, and especially the institutional form, has dabbled on the fringes of scenario planning.
