Foresight has a bad habit of mistaking surface motion for structural change. A new aesthetic appears, a cluster of behaviors coheres, a few signals show up across media and commerce, and suddenly the future is declared. This came up in a recent Culture Mapping workshop as we tried to understand why foresight so often feels detached from culture even when culture is clearly driving the issue. The problem, it seemed, was not that people failed to value foresight. It was that they kept treating it as a separate strategic exercise rather than as a cultural question from the start.
That is one reason Causal Layered Analysis continues to matter. As Sohail Inayatullah has argued, CLA is less about predicting a single future than about opening up the present so alternative futures can be made thinkable. It slows the rush to conclusion and asks what sits beneath the litany of events, beneath the system of causes, and even behind the worldview that organizes those causes. It insists that foresight attend not only to what is happening, but to the deeper narratives and assumptions that make certain futures appear natural, desirable, or inevitable.
