And the results of that approach are consistent with the kind of foresight needed by strategists. That is, the foresight needed is to know the direction of things in time for adjustment to be made and for survival and success to be achieved. What can be predicted is not end results and end forms. What can be predicted is process, organization, integration and continuation of kind rather than specifics. The scale of prediction has changed.
Foresight is a matter of interpretation rather than information.
There are tools of interpretation that provide foresight which is not merely extended hindsight. This is a world of emergent cause and effect with constant occurrences which are not extensions of the past but creations of the past. Emergence is a new kind of cause and effect. It is the cause and effect of living entities and the phenomena related to them. 4 Examples include intelligence from a grouping of neurones, life from a collection of cells, prices and a marketplace from a collection of merchants, Internet from a collection of computers, the phenomenon of Microsoft from a simple programme and a few suppliers to an exploding market.