The Hindu Business Line : Fashioning the future to fit your vision

Every human activity, whether by individuals, communities or organisations, has repercussions and ramifications. The more the degree of awareness in regard to them, the more the prospect of getting the intended outcome. Cultivating that kind of awareness is part of a conscious process of keeping the mental antennae up and active to capture the signals being received at every stage of conceiving and proceeding with an activity.

In the 1960s, the idea of policy planning became the rage in organisations in the US and rapidly spread to other countries, including India. The inspiration for it came from the military establishment, whose effectiveness in safeguarding the nation's security lay in being on top of likely emergencies. For this purpose, it constantly engaged itself in multi-disciplinary appraisals and war games, and kept advance contingency plans ready for countering threats and launching operations at short notice.

It was thought that a similar continuing exercise would be useful for civil organisations too. Policy planning bureaus thus became the vogue. Governments as well as business enterprises found in them a mechanism that really conduced to purposeful governance without ugly surprises being sprung on them.

In essence, policy planning involved taking stock of the impact of current policies, the course they are likely to run, and formulating measures to reinforce the positive, and ward off the negative, effects. A policy planner was also called upon to anticipate the emergence of new issues and problems and help enhance the preparedness of organisations to adapt their responses and approaches to meet new conditions and circumstances without being taken unawares.

INVENTING THE FUTURE

Policy planning is neither easy nor simple. It entails application of informed judgment to the significance of facts gathered for their reliability and relevance. Interpreted properly, they also disclose certain trends and directions, and will be seen to fall into a pattern. The policy planner's mettle is apt to be sorely tested in his mustering the ability to elicit these trends and patterns from hard facts, extrapolate from them in an unbiased manner the nature of future developments and recommend the right policies.

While policy planning was aimed at increasing the inherent and institutional capacity to confront what the future was expected to unfold, the futuribles movement had the more ambitious goal of bringing to the task the subtler faculties of forecasting and prediction. In other words, one did not wait passively to know what the future had in store, but aspired to `invent' or `sculpt' it to fit one's expectations and requirements.

Can the future be really shaped at will? The question is not as outlandish as it seems for the simple reason that the future is not something that stands by itself, but is a product, an outcome, a culmination, or an extension of the sum total of the events that have taken place in the past and are taking place in the present. For instance, it is possible to predict the growing of the mango tree if the seed had been sown in the past or the burning of the finger if the act of putting it into the fire takes place in the present. By not sowing the seed or not putting out the finger, it is possible to have the kind of future (not having a mango tree, not burning the finger) we want.

Likewise, it is possible for an organisation, a society, a nation, or an individual to shape current events so that they lead to a pre-determined future. All that is needed is a clear vision of the future and the will to marshal and apply the needed intellectual, manpower, material, financial and technological resources to that end from now onwards.

B. S. RAGHAVAN