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Foresight in action: A spotlight interview with Sohail Inayatullah
Sohail Inayatullah is a professor at Tamkang University Taipei and the UNESCO Chair in Future Studies at the Sejahtera Center for Sustainable Humanity in Malaysia.
With Dr. Ivana Milojevic, he is the founder of educational think tank Metafuture and works in the field, and at the university and corporate institutional level. With the UN System Staff College, he is co-designing the 2025 UN System Strategic Foresight Springboard Programme, an eight-week online course that guides UN personnel in utilizing strategic foresight tools to reflect on how these approaches can influence and adapt projects for planning meaningful futures.
In an era marked by rapid and unprecedented transformation, the United Nations(UN) must continuously evolve its approach to delivering on its mandate so that it is better equipped to not only respond to change, but also support Member States in navigating uncertainty brought by climate change, demographic shifts and technological advancement – while charting new paths toward better, greener and safer futures.
This is where foresight plays a vital role. By encouraging a proactive mindset and exploring possible futures, strategic foresight can enable the UN to plan for shifts in staff expertise, develop next-generation cooperation frameworks and gain more comprehensive insights to strengthen policy advice – all while minimizing risks.
In this Spotlight Interview with UNSSC’s Liyaan Sataravala and Cecilia Ferraro Titin, Sohail shares his insights on applying strategic foresight, its role in the UN system and steps for UN personnel to get started.
Liyaan: UN 2.0 defines strategic foresight as cultivating structured methods that help to navigate uncertainty, imagine better futures and chart new paths forward. But foresight can sometimes feel like an abstract concept – difficult to grasp, let alone implement. In your experience, what does foresight mean?
Sohail: Political psychologist, social theorist and critic Ashish Nandy talked about how today's utopias can also become tomorrow's nightmares. It's not always a given.
It’s context dependent.
Critical futures thinking – one of the three research dimensions of future studies – says: “Yes, we need to look at opportunities, obstacles and risk, but we also need to change who we are”. Foresight, in that sense, is not doing things to others, but seeing how we are part of a complex adaptive system.
I work with international development agencies and, initially, they considered themselves as “external players”. The narrative was that there are distinct universes, people who need help, and us – the development agencies – who help them. I typically suggest that we are in a shared universe. So, instead of “we do for/to you”, it is about “we do together”. This change creates different types of futures, where agencies are still the facilitators, where they are engaged in intervention and are mindful of how they are creating reality. It's a world where we are part of both the problem and the solution. It's about co-creating alternative futures with tech, nature and humans.
Cecilia: What role does foresight play in the UN today? Has it changed over the past few years? If so, what key drivers/trends do you see?
Sohail: If we go back 20, 30, 40 years, working with futures was considered weird. When I was 18, I remember one professor, said: “It's a can of worms. You're wasting your life”. The sense was that the future meant jets, flying cars and robots but was not touching the real issues of that time, such as human dignity and access to food and human rights.
In the last 10 to15 years, with the accelerating and heterogeneous rate of change – whether it’s changing hegemons, a global financial crisis or the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) - the perception has shifted. For instance, in the 1980s, I was reporting on the role of AI and judicial decision-making in Hawaii, and I published a piece on the legal rights of robots. However, that was around forty-plus years ago and at that time it didn’t make sense, it was not intelligible. Today you have ChatGPT and large language models, and now, suddenly, AI makes sense to everyone.
I was part of a wonderful project with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Egypt. They brought us together with leading UN staff, leading manufacturers and members of the cabinet to reflect on where Egypt should go. What should be done with AI? The traditional way to do planning would have been to adopt a problem-solution approach. Yet, at that time, we decided to proceed differently and identified the following possible scenarios:
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Scenario one. The gap expands – we are unable to change the gap between poor and rich, genders, and nations.
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Scenario two. One hundred million to a billion - manufacturing focuses on regional exports especially the one billion strong African market.
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Scenario three, or the Golden Key. New opportunities offered by Industry 4.0 are harnessed. New technologies lead to productivity improvements and the workforce is reskilled.
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Scenario four, or the Alibaba Transformation. In this radical change scenario, the latent business potential of informal sector, smaller formal sector firms and youth bulge are unleashed through the linking of two areas, the informal sector (including micro-small formal enterprises) and digital platform technologies. The informal and education sectors lead in the transformation of manufacturing. This new approach suggested that new tech would create a bottoms-up economic revolution in Egypt, and they called it Alibaba Transformation.
This shows that the world is changing. There are demographic shifts, onshoring and new technologies. The question is, where can technology be used most wisely?
Another way to use futures is to go deeper to see what the actual cause of a problem is. For example, with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Mongolia, we were looking at a range of issues, from tobacco use to gastric cancer. We did this through the following analyses:
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Level one, or Litany Data Analysis. We focused on the available national health data and observed a dramatic rise in gastric cancer cases.
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Level two. We focused on the food people were eating and on the overall systemic causes of cancer.
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Level three. We shifted from systems to worldviews. One participant, for example, suggested that the real cause of gastric cancer lies in the fact that, being caught between eras, the worldview that was held during the socialist era no longer applies to the current market era.
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Level four. We identified how this suggestion could be expressed as a metaphor. Metaphors must speak to the stories people tell about themselves, their lived realities, their possible futures and what that means in terms of deep culture.
After identifying a context-specific metaphor, we then reflected on finding a new measurement — to have gastric cancer disappear from Mongolia – and on our proposal for real changes that the Mongolia Ministry of Health could enact.
This case was an example of how – starting with empirical evidence – foresight can be used to go deeper. We used foresight because more traditional approaches were not working.
When it comes to the UN, we are in a transitional period. The way we approach the world is constantly shifting and the UN has to use strategic foresight to think through what's next. Where do we want to go? What are the possible scenarios? How are we approaching these shifts? What's the new metaphor for the UN? Once you start to play in this area, you get better outcomes and metaphors, instead of generic ones.
The world is changing, and UN entities are using strategic foresight to address this change. Yet, it's too easy to say, “they'll do it”, because we are all part of both the problem and the solution, so we must apply it ourselves.
Liyaan: How could today’s efforts and skills in foresight support the UN?
Sohail: The questions that need to be asked are, what would a UN in 2070 look like if AI did 90% of what the UN is doing today? Can you develop rational decision-making? Can you ensure the algorithms are inclusive? What would a future UN Secretary-General look like?
For the Strategic Foresight Springboard Programme, we want to create a space where individuals can come to find their solutions to these kinds of questions. Our methodology unfolds week by week. Starting with strategic foresight in the UN, then exploring the Futures Triangle and mapping change. We move on to trends, signals and disruptions, followed by macro patterns and historical shifts. In week five, we develop scenarios, and in week six, we explore deeper cultural narratives — before wrapping up with transformation back casting.
Every week, we have a structure for participants to learn and use strategic foresight methods on problems that are urgent to them. I find that when there's a real issue, people use foresight methods and find novel solutions. We want them to bring their problems, bring what they're facing — personally, in their agency, in the UN, in other areas — while we bring the methods and tools. We will act as guides, leading people to understanding possible futures and then applying them in their domain area, in their division, or wherever they might wish to work.
Cecilia: If you had to name one piece of advice to yourself as a futurist when you were just starting out, what would it be, and how might that apply to those working in the UN today?
Sohail: In the 1980's I published work in two areas, that is on the rise of the Pacific and East Asia with China becoming the centre of the world economy by 2020, and the implications of AI on judicial decision-making.
During my presentations, leaders would fall asleep. I wondered why. I realized I was giving speeches without connecting them individually. I was not telling a story, but merely filling the room with quantitative data.
Later on, I was working on a large project on quantitative forecasting for the judicial system. Towards the end of the project, one of the administrators said: “Well, you thought it was just the forecasting, but, really, I understood the narrative of people on the committee who gave the funding. I understood their core story.”
One other piece of advice is knowing where the person you're working with is at. Sometimes, people really want to make a jump and make the impossible possible. Sometimes, they are so overwhelmed that they just want a few simple steps. Other times, they are anxious about missing a disruption and they need weak signals for rising scanning. Almost every group is different. Our role as coaches, as navigators, as guides, is really to find out what participants’ actual needs are. This is about sensitivity, or what some people call “meeting the client where they're at”. This is the design part. Once you understand where they're at, then it’s possible to find the right methods, tools and approaches to get them where they wish to go. The springboard is, for example, designed step by step to enhance efficacy and confidence so that participants can figure out what exactly is needed.
