دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله آینده پژوهی برای بهبود تاثیر اجتماعی – Forumforthefuture

آینده پژوهی (دیده بانی آینده) برای بهبود تاثیر اجتماعی

Horizon scanning to improve social impact

Introduction

There is a general consensus that we are entering a period of recurrent volatility and uncertainty. Financial and climatic shocks in an era of increasing interconnectivity ripple across the world in unpredictable ways with grave consequences for the most poor and vulnerable. During the last five years we have witnessed the effects of a global financial meltdown, political upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa, the first declared pandemic in over 40 years, as well as an increasing number of climate related weather events, including Tropical Cyclone Mahasan and Typhoon Haiyan. Global volatility will most likely increase. According to the OECD, “Disruptive shocks to the global economy are likely to become more frequent and cause greater economic and societal hardship. The spiller effect of events like the financial crisis or a potential pandemic will amplify due to the increasing interconnectivity of the global economy, people, goods and data.”1 The number of cell phone subscribers globally has grown from 1 billion in 2000 to over 6 billion today, of which nearly 5 billion are in developing countries.2 By 2016, the Cisco Network Forecast estimates there will be nearly 18.9 billion network connections― almost 2.5 connections for each person on earth― compared with 10.3 billion in 2011.3 On the environmental front, rising global temperatures and extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent and severe. Climate change forces are complex – impacts can interact with other factors in unpredictable and uncertain ways. As an example, drought-induced wildfires that destroyed a fifth of Russia’s wheat crop in 2010, coupled with floods in Canada and Australia, led to price spikes in global food markets, which eventually triggered social unrest in the Middle East.4 Price volatility can cause disproportionate hardships for people living in poverty in developing countries, including higher malnutrition rates. Malnutrition increases individuals’ vulnerability to disease, and compromises their ability to work. Women are at a greater risk, as they are more likely than men to work in low-paying and informal occupations before a shock happens.5 Malnutrition among children can limit children’s cognitive development, reduce their ability to learn and have “a devastating impact on a child’s future potential.”6 Impacts such as these, at the level of individuals, families, and communities, can occur below the radar of current monitoring and knowledge gathering practices. White papers, reports and briefing papers, while a resource for understanding on-going trends, risk becoming outdated due to the increased pace of change or being too single-issue focused and missing the systemic implications of change. These liabilities are perhaps even greater in the development world due to the information and geographical gap between decisionmakers and those with on-the-ground contextual knowledge – thus increasing the risk that solutions are less successful because decision-making was not based on an accurate understanding of current conditions. In these environments organizational capacity to understand how change is happening is becoming a central determinant of effective intervention design. Horizon scanning, or environmental scanning, is a means by which to develop intelligence about the nature of change through a systematic examination of on-going trends and emerging signals. Traditionally, horizon scanning is based on desk research such as the Internet, international organizations, academia, etc., however, continual innovation in digital technologies are providing new and cost effective ways to collaborate and share knowledge across diverse groups of people for better sensemaking. The aim of this report is to share insights and recommendations for the development of a design of a future horizon scanning function. It should be noted that while we acknowledge that mobile technologies are providing unprecedented opportunities for real-time trend analysis, particularly in the developing world – this report doesn’t focus on “big data” as a core component of a horizon scanning function. Instead, it explores the principles and activities of building a horizon-scanning program as an organizational capacity. Within this context, big-data analysis is a tool, among many, to augment analysts’ sensemaking capacity, but does not replace it. The report is divided into four sections:  Design principles for a horizon scanning function  Approaches to leveraging collective intelligence  Key activities of a horizon scanning practice  Horizon scanning as organizational learning