ABSTRACT
The apparent jumble of unrelated information that now bombards our senses makes for the feeling of an exceedingly turbulent world … indeed a justifiable deduction (for example, the average duration of a TV news-clip is about 90 seconds and comes complete with full colour sensory stimulation … frequent changes of picture and voice commentary). Making sense of this unrelated information is another task …
Denis Loveridge lecturing on ‘Black Monday’ as the world’s stock markets crashed in unison, October 1987
Open reports from public foresight programmes are the largest body of literature about the practice and procedures in use at the present time. These reports are the basis of this chapter in which there are three parts: the first discusses the nature of public foresight programmes (institutional Foresight); the second is devoted to operational aspects of institutional Foresight; the chapter ends with a critique of these programmes.
