Start shaping your future today
Whether you consider yourself a ‘planner’ or a more spontaneous person, many things in our life involve serious long-term thinking. Landmarks like learning a new skill, planning a holiday adventure, or saving for a home are unlikely to happen overnight. Despite this, we can find our brains awash with the here and now, leaving us little time to consider the future we want for ourselves in a few years’ time.
Thinking about our long-term future is also something organisations and governments must do to ensure a preferred and sustainable future. That’s why Sustainability Victoria is keen to foster ‘futures’ thinkers, to encourage and grow foresight across the Victorian public service and wider community.
What is foresight?
Foresight is essentially long-term thinking, allowing us to identify both opportunities and challenges and be better prepared for them if they eventuate. Long-term challenges require long-term thinking, and many government decisions need to consider the future decades in advance to inform investment, planning, and behaviour change.
“Foresight is the practice of thinking systematically about things that might happen, so we can be better prepared for them if they eventuate.”
Long-term strategic thinking is one of our most important tools on the road to a circular, climate-resilient future.
Futures Forum: Embedding long-term thinking across government
To advance the practice of long-term thinking across the Victorian Government, Sustainability Victoria recently hosted a Futures Forum, the first in-person meeting of the newly formed Future and Foresight Network.
More than 75 curious minds from 22 government agencies and authorities descended on SV Hub for the event, eager to expand their connections and capability in foresight.
The wide range of attendees demonstrates the broad appeal of long-term strategic thinking across the Victorian public service.
“We make decisions today that start shaping the future.”
Attendees heard from presenters representing Melbourne Water, the EPA and more, demonstrating how they are using long-term thinking to help their organisations better plan for a preferred future. Encouraging decision-makers to use different parts of their brains was seen as a powerful way to achieve this.
Collaborating for a sustainable future
Futures Forum attendees all agreed that they wanted to work together to help shape Victoria’s future, rather than waiting for the future to shape us.
The event’s Futures Bazaar activity offered valuable opportunities for collaboration across teams with a shared interest in sustainable futures.
Providing many light bulb moments, this interactive and creative workshop tested attendees’ imaginations, encouraging them to consider future worlds and bring them to life using objects from the ‘bazaar’.
Sustainability Victoria will continue to support collaboration through events like the Futures Forum, ensuring that government agencies are working together and preparing for a preferable and sustainable future for all Victorians.
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Visual summary
This video shows attendees at the Futures Forum held at SV Hub, with speakers appearing via live interviews on the day.
Speakers are:
- Florian Van Den Corput, Senior Advisor Circular Economy, Sustainability Victoria
- Andrew Blades, Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions
- Gwynne Brennon, Energy Safe Victoria
Text
[Opening visual of slide with text saying ‘SV Lab, Futures Forum’]
[The visuals during this webinar are of attendees though-out that day creating objects of that assist them to learn long-term thinking, otherwise known as foresight]Transcript
Florian Van Den Corput:
The SV lab has set up this event as part of the Futures and Foresight Network that we've created last year. The network was created to really create that community of practice around futures and foresight work. And the SV lab has set up this event to get all the VPS stakeholders in this sector together.
Andrew Blades:
And the goal is to really start collaborating and hopefully get to a point where we can really tackle some of these big issues.
For me, it's all about long term planning. And really thinking about what are the actions that we're taking today, what's that going to look like in 5 to 10 years? And then out to that 20 year mark. We make decisions today that starts shaking the future. So, it's the ability to think in a much longer-term way and try and work out what we do today and how that might cascade.
Gwynne Brennon:
It's important for us to keep ahead of the trends, particularly in the era of renewables and the rapid technological changes that are happening.
How we're living now is what we looked at three years ago, so we've got to look much further ahead than just five years in this space - we need to be looking ahead to 10, 15, 20 years.[JC1] So that’s why we're doing foresight and futures thinking.
Florian Van Den Corput:
Futures and foresight work, means looking at some of the massive issues that we're faced with today around climate change, inequality, those kinds of elements. This something that needs to be a collaborative effort for the entire government. So, in that sense, it's important to us that we get multiple people from a diverse set of branches and departments together to think about these topics.
Andrew Blades:
Just having the number of different people with different experiences to be able to contribute to your particular approach to the future. We all come from our own particular disciplines, our own particular experience, and you really need to open that right up to be able to listen to different views.
Gwynne Brennon:
The innovation networks are a real gem and if you've got a curious mind, if you're a person who really wants to make change, particularly into the future, then I think it's absolutely the place to be to get together with like minds and bounce those ideas off each other. And hopefully future proof of what we can control a little bit more.
And that's why I'm excited to see a whole room full of curious minds coming together today.
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