About - UNGP - Foresight Project

UN Global Pulse Strategic Foresight Project in a Nutshell

Questions in Focus

HOW MIGHT WE ...

… build an organization able to keep up with rapid changes in an increasingly complex and uncertain world?
… ensure preparedness and resilience for future shocks?
… step up innovation efforts and tackle multiple interconnected global crises?
… generate radically different future visions to spark hope and drive action?

These are some of the questions behind the genesis of the Strategic Foresight project (2020-2022) led by UN Global Pulse, the Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab.

The experimentation supports and advances the UN Charter guided by Our Common Agenda and focuses on four impact areas:

This website focuses primarily on the first area of work – accelerating evidence and experimentation-based learning. Through experiments, we collected key insights, tools and resources that we hope others will find useful for their own foresight journey.

Impact in Numbers

While the impact of investments in organizational foresight capacity and the advancement of forward-looking cultures and inclusion will be realised over time, the numbers below provide an overview of the key outputs delivered.

Countries Engaged

Map key

Collaboration

UN Global Pulse Strategic Foresight project has been generously funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs Finland

“Strategic foresight is critical in our changing world. The means to act on the future must be within everyone’s reach. This is why Finland supports Foresight work and UN Global Pulse, SG’s innovation lab, which is ideally positioned to support the UN system in taking on the challenge.”

Aki Enkenberg, Team Leader: Innovation and Digital Cooperation, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland

We have experimented and collaborated with:

Approach

We define foresight as a collaborative process that explores futures in a structured and systematic way to anticipate, prepare and impact the course of change.

The base assumption is that, whilst the future cannot be known, exploring different future scenarios can help us imagine the plausible risks and opportunities, and with that awareness, make better decisions.

Thinking about the long-term consequences of our actions is a responsibility we all share for the future of our planet and next generations. Our visions of the future are powerful as they guide and impact our actions today.

We endorse the notion that the future belongs to everyone
We promote participatory and inclusive approaches and take a systems view to change, connecting collaborators and key actors across mandates
We test new methods and explore opportunities to mix foresight with data, behavioural and innovation approaches, recognising that foresight is a rapidly evolving discipline and not a one-size-fits-all definitive solution