Foresight Work as Bridge Building: Poetry, Presence and Beyond

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are." Wallace Stevens (1982) In this piecemeal essay I wish to make a case for futurist as bridge builder. By this I mean that the futurist enables those in contexts to begin to move in directions that are optimal vis-à-vis the goals of their organisation or community. The construction of such pathways, as bridges, to the future is a work of hands, heads and hearts and thus requires craft, theoretical knowledge and love. This amalgam comes together and is expressed as a form of practical imagination in which the futurist holds a creative space that enables clients to see things, as the poet Wallace Stevens said, " beyond us, yet ourselves ". It is this seeing things 'beyond us' that enables a richer sense making to come into effect and opens up reality to alternatives that generate multiple possibilities and offer a greater level of congruence between aspiration and the everyday. These reflections are the result of spending three months teaching at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore where I had a wonderful group of strategic foresight students in the