3 PATTERNING 4 REFOCUSING
3 PATTERNING 4 REFOCUSING
Phase 3. Patterning- Including new perspectives and forecasting
This third phase is a very exciting one, where the perspective is shifted from understanding the now to what might happen in the future. Drawing further on the identified pivotal points and trends, patterns can be drawn and meaningfully projected in the future. Models that produce algorithmic forecasts can play a helpful role in this phase, but can at the same time never substitute for the need to perform foresighting activity through bringing together different actors’ reasoning, discussion, and engage in a collaborative exercise of‘ making sense’. Often models lack precisely this information that has been identified in phase 2, and therefore fail to recognize the trends in time for being able to react rapidly and avoid a delayed response. So this phase is also about using the knowledge gained in the first two phases in an open, collaborative and creative process, which maps what is happening and what might happen‘ if’. Here, a wide range of actors should be invited in order to step outside of what has been thought before.
Phase 4. Refocusing- Integrate the new gained knowledge and decide on a potential set of experiments
This phase involves the digestion of the key points resulting from the phases before, thereby deepening awareness and understanding. With this newly-gained and richer perspective, promising experiments can be evaluated according to their potential to live up to societal trends, their leverage effects to influence trends towards a certain direction, their interplay with existing systems and structures, and the extent to which the municipality can engage with them. This filtering of attention to certain experiments and surrounding experiments should then be summarized in a document. The idea is to list those experiments of which the potential has to be tested( as we will see later, by taking step A of the strategy’ s second part-‘ A-B-C of experimenting’).
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