A new federal office to gameplan for future crises?

German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel once said, “The historian is a prophet facing backwards.”

As the federal government sees increasing demands for services ranging from natural disaster response to international conflicts, a new group is calling for the expansion and centralization of practices that could put agencies on the leading edge of events instead of reacting to them. 

The Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance, a nonprofit group comprised of federal and industry veterans, wants to advance a policy known as strategic foresight from disparate pockets of practice within agencies to an essential practice across the federal government. 

“We’re not anticipating change, we’re reacting once it’s in our face and people are demanding that the government have a position,” said Suzette Brooks Masters, co-chair of the group alongside Robin Champ and Kara Cunzeman. “I think the culture of reaction is not our best foot forward. If we could figure out a way to get ahead of these things, to integrate them so all of the agencies are thinking about these changes, not just a task force that’s stood up on the quick and dirty to solve something right away because there’s political pressure.”  

Strategic foresight — which seeks to go beyond forecasting future events by anticipating and planning for them through methods like trend analysis and scenario-based exercises — has been outlined in Part 6 of the Office of Management and Budget’s A-11 circular since at least 2016 as a method that agencies can incorporate into their strategic planning and to address future challenges and help avoid the limitation of resources and coordination due to isolated agency siloes. 

However, federal agencies have been practicing strategic foresight on individual projects as far back as the 1980s with the Environmental Protection Agency and has further expanded across a range of agencies, from the CIA and U.S. Marine Corps to the Coast Guard and Veterans Affairs Department. 

Champ, who previously served as chief strategist at the Secret Service and Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said researching the Coast Guard’s foresight strategy for anticipating future operational environment, known as Evergreen, was a sea change moment in her approach to strategic planning. 

“I always felt like something was missing with the way I was asked to do strategy and the way the government prepared me to do strategy,” she said. “And it wasn’t until I did some digging around and I started studying the Coast Guard’s Project Evergreen and their scenario planning work that I realized that this is what’s missing, this deliberate look into the future and looking at alternative scenarios before we sit down and write a strategy is what was missing.”

The group’s goal is to help unify the disparate strategic foresight efforts and streamline its use by first establishing an Office of Strategic Foresight within OMB and exploring the later possibility of establishing a Cabinet-level Department of Strategic Foresight or the appointment of a National Foresight Advisor to strengthen the policy across government with dedicated resource. 

“The reason we picked OMB is for the link to strategy,” said Champ. “As a strategist, we should not be writing strategy unless we’ve had a thoughtful examination of the future and the ways the future could be different from today and the multiple ways the future could unfold, not just how we think it’s going to look.”

Cunzeman said the creation of a central strategic foresight hub within OMB would help support agencies to apply the strategic thinking, but to gain the true benefits could require help from Congress to codify and scale its use. 

“There are pockets of foresight happening across the government, but it is certainly not incentivized to the degree that is required to do this well as a nation and it gets back to that whole of government integrating function,” she said. “At some point, we are going to hit a wall where there will need to be legislative changes for this to actually work.”

The group pointed to successful applications of foresight in other nations and allies, such as Canada, Finland, the European Union and others and said that it is integral to helping shape U.S. response and competitiveness in the future.

“This is going to be a heavy lift, but I do believe that once people experience the power of acknowledging the fundamental uncertainty that we’re facing, especially with all of this rapid change that they’ll feel like this is going to help them,” said Brooks Masters.