foresight according to proGective

The “French Prospective” [literally: “to look ahead”] is a discipline of the social sciences officially born in France in 1957, which is based on economy, sociology and political sciences to influence temporal dynamics and the changes which result from them.

Exploratory, it helps to draw the possible futures, often through scenarios.

Normative, it is a tool of collective intelligence which makes it possible to define a vision of the future. This vision represents the goal to be reached by a given organization, firm, State or local authority.

It can be available in terms of projects for a firm, a territory or a society/community.

proGective's works privilege an operational approach both exploratory and normative, and action-oriented (policy design, long-term strategies, implementation of innovations, etc).

operational approach

In an industrial context, the ‘prospective' can have a meaning and find its justification only in its concrete prolongations. It must thus ensure permanently itself that it meets precisely the needs of its operational users, even if it means to risk its soul. For it is in this fragile exercise between long term and immediate concerns, between futures vision and concrete decision, that lies the art of the futurist.

Francis GIRAUD, Elf Aquitaine, “Prospective and strategic management of the industrial group Elf Aquitaine”, in Les Cahiers de l'ENSPTT, n°1, June 1996

normative approach

Contrary to almost all the societies of the past and to the majority of those of the present, to think the future has become a vital stake for ours, because there is no alternative and we cannot leave it, purely and simply, to luck or to the interaction of forces from which control would escape to us.

Jean-Pierre WARNIER, ethnologist, professor of anthropology at the University Paris V - Rene Descartes, 1997

collective approach

A “prospective” approach which, beyond a planning aim based on forecasts sometimes contradicted by reality, endeavours, in order to overcome uncertainty, to increase the collective intelligence of the actors and to grant human beings the central place which is theirs.

“Prospective, debate, public decision”, Avis du CES sur le rapport présenté by J.P. BAILLY au nom de la Commission Spéciale du Plan - July 1998

Futurology [term invented by Ossip FLETCHEIM in the years 1940].

Originally, futurology was defined as a critical, systematic and normative analysis of the issues relating to the future. Ossip FLETCHEIM entrusted it with the mission to prohibite wars, eliminate famine and poverty, fight exploitation, stop the excessive use of natural resources and create a new human being, more human, the Homo Humanus. But, in the French language, this word “futurology” seemed carrying an insane arrogance as built on ‘logos': the science of the future. Thus the term ‘prospective', much more modest, was preferred and accepted.

Today, in the Anglophone countries as well as in the French-speaking, it is highly recommended to avoid the use of “futurology” whose connotation “science of the future” brings it too close to ‘prediction', another proscribed word. One will also avoid the French term “futurologue” (who often refers to “astrologer”) although sometimes its English translation, “futurologist”, is still employed in the Russian or German-speaking countries, or by mass media.