Institute For The Future

Building Policy Coherence Through Futures Thinking

For a good chunk of 2012 I worked with GeSCI, a Kenyan based organization founded by UN ICT Task Force and focused on building knowledge societies through technical assistance. GeSCI had just launched their pilot African Leadership in ICT (ALICT) program, and we came in to develop a futures thinking curriculum as part of this new course.

ALICT is a blended online/offline course for primarily mid-level government officials focused on building the skills necessary to create innovative and sustainable policies geared towards creating successful knowledge societies.

The ALICT course contains multiple modules looking at everything from education to innovation to ICT. We provided futures thinking frameworks within each of the core modules, along with assignments to develop participants’ futures thinking capacity.

Throughout the course, ALICT participants learned fundamental futures thinking methodologies including signaling, horizon scanning, and alternative futures.

Through guided online assignments and online chats each of the 5 countries involved in the pilot course—Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mauritius, and South Africa—ultimately created alternative futures for education, ICT, and STI within their countries.

In August on 2012, Sean and I travelled to Ethiopia to run a 3-day workshop at the African Union headquarters to close out the ALICT course. The workshop was an exciting and engaging 3-days aimed at immersing the 70 participants into the world of futures thinking, and to help them take their scenarios and build national and regional roadmaps towards a knowledge society.

You can check out my opening presentation:

And here is the half-day process and templates created for country teams to share local signals, trends, and drivers:

For more context, below is the detailed agenda for the entire pilot African Leadership in ICT final workshop: