Defra experience At a private meeting of foresight practitioners people asked each other 'Where do you fit? What is expected of you?' What was notable was that typically the foresight team is battered from pillar to post, sometimes popping up as a thinktank, or risk, or strategy. There's a constant tension between the need to be deviant and the need to fit in, and be sponsored by, the organizational hierarchy. So perhaps, necessarily, foresight is not a thing to institutionalize as a layer of activity, but to nurture as a bottom up network that the hierarchy does not have the capacity to thwart. (Foresight practitioner)
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This toolkit is designed to help you to do the right futures work in the right way, with the greatest possible effect and the least possible waste. It brings together the collected experience of six years of Defra futures work with best practice from other areas and squashes the whole lot into a cheerful medley of sharp advice, warm encouragement and frequently rather caustic commentary.

If you've never been here before, we recommend that you Start here or have a quick look at what futures is. If you know what you're looking for, try the Contents or search. If you're just curious, read on...

This toolkit steps you lightly through the lifecycle of a futures project, from earliest conception to final evaluation and on into the benefits that each project can have for the next one. Everything here is designed to be useful whether you're launching a battleship or just dipping in a toe: the principles of futures work and the requirements and approaches are the same.

  • The first section - Getting to the beginning - is all about preparation: what to think about, who to talk to, what to look for and gather if you don't already have it. At the end of that section you should be sure of your ground and your resources, ready to articulate your purpose and approach and aware of how you fit in with other works.
  • The second section - Setting up - is where you start work. It's made up of a mixture of practical steps and careful checks: as you assemble your machinery and point it in the right direction it will make sure that you haven't missed anything out and especially that you have the right people in the right places.
  • The third section - Steering and managing - is about staying afloat and on course. Futures work is not the kind that you can commission and forget, and here you'll find many ways that a project can go wrong along with the danger signs you should look out for, disciplines to apply and remedies to keep at hand.
  • The fourth section - Finishing and starting - is where it all comes to a point. It's about how to have an effect - how to reach people, be understood to them and affect their thinking - how to evaluate your work and how to make sure it is there to inform and support your next futures work and that of other people.

The toolkit can be used purposefully, to learn about a particular subject or to make sure that you have an area covered. As well its explanatory text, every section leads with a checklist of things to do and think about, and backs it all up with a collection of quotes and background remarks fromn others who have been that way.

It can also be rambled through: we've paid a lot of attention to linking and filling out, and we hope you will find unexpected illuminations and useful tips just by following your nose through the pages and the various useful things attached to them.

This is both an experiment in progress and a finished guidebook, so we will count it as a failure if it doesn't annoy you at some point, but we trust that it will already have helped you by that point. Our ultimate goal is that you, collectively, should make it your own, deface it, improve it, explain why it annoys you and in turn add something that will annoy the next visitor.

It has been pointed out that ants are more likely to place their burden on an existing pile than they are to start a new one. This, then, is a pile of stuff that we have assembled, in the hope that visitors will colonise it and start to add their own material. We hope you mostly like it, and we hope that it prompts you into action.

We would be very glad to hear your reactions, and even more glad to see you add or make changes to the pages here. Have at it!

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