The Transformative Gap: What Organizational Foresight Disowns and How KHDA is Building a Foresight Learning Ecosystem
Foresight in organizations has grown up around one idea: that anticipating the future is a capability to be built, measured, and linked to performance. What that framing leaves out is the older, more unruly strand of futures studies — the tradition of Slaughter, Inayatullah, and Sardar — which insists that the real work is questioning the assumptions, narratives, and power relations through which an organization imagines its futures. The two literatures barely cite each other. This session presents draft research on a government agency that has tried to close that gap by design: Dubai's Knowledge and Human Development Authority, whose Futures Council formally embeds strategic and transformative foresight through five practitioner roles with declared balances, role pairings that put critique upstream of analysis, and an evaluation logic that asks "are we thinking better about the future, together?" before it asks whether targets were hit. The session sets out the model, the evidence for the gap, and design lessons for governments elsewhere.
In this session we'll start by 1400 Dubai Time (GMT +4) and finish at 1500.
Dr. John A. Sweeney is an Education Expert and Future Foresight Lead at the Dubai Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA). Previously, he served as the UNESCO Chair for Futures Studies in Anticipatory Governance and Sustainable Policymaking at Westminster International University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of World Futures Review: A Journal of Strategic Foresight. As a practitioner, consultant, and educator, John has organized, managed, and facilitated workshops and seminars, multi-stakeholder projects, and foresight games and simulations in 50 countries on six continents doing in-person and online with participants from all around the world. He has worked with numerous universities, international development and humanitarian aid agencies, nonprofit foundations, Fortune 500 companies, and educational and cultural organizations, such as the Asian Development Bank, CDC, IAEA, IFRC, INTERPOL, GIZ, The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, NATO, NESTA, WHO, and numerous UN agencies across over a dozen countries. Additionally, he has experience working with public sector and civil service foresight and innovation units, such as Singapore's Centre for Strategic Futures, Georgia's Public Service Development Agency, and Dubai's Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation. He has taught futures and foresight at the University of Houston, Chiang Mai University's School of Public Policy, the Dubai Future Academy, and numerous other institutions around the world. At present, John is a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation and a member of the Association of Professional Futurists. His research and professional work has been published in numerous academic journals and media outlets.