SPECIAL REPORT
Remembering the Future: Every Leader Can Practice Foresight
Lyna Matesi, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Management MBA Program Director
My Research I studied the role of foresight in leader-narrated visions by examining lectures from 17 Nobel Peace Prize laureates who won the Prize for human rights leadership between 1960 and 2011. These leaders were publicly recognized for envisioning and enacting peace at individual, organizational, and social levels. I Learned that Leaders Remember the Future Narrated foresight creates a preferred or ideal future by helping people, organizations, and society remember their future. Using memory, leaders act as human anticipation machines. Studies in neuroscience show that the same neural machinery is used to imagine both the past and the future (Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007). “These findings,” reported Schacter et al. (2007), “have led to the concept of the prospective brain; an idea that a crucial function of the brain is to use stored information to imagine, simulate and predict possible future events” (p. 657). According to Ingvar (1985), the prefrontal cortex is crucial in foresight and in using neural machinery to remember future episodes in great detail. Tulving (1983) found that episodic memory allows for “mental time travel” to both the past and the future (p. 2). El Sawy’s (1985) study of CEOs found that when asked to forecast events (futura) in their personal futures by first remembering past events (facta), the CEOs had a significantly longer, richer, more detailed view of their future time horizon than did CEOs who only simulated the future without remembering the past. According to Gilbert (2006): The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future . . . . the human brain is an “anticipation machine”, and “making future” is the most important thing it does. (pp. 5-6) Making future, or using Gilbert’s human anticipation machine, is complicated by our notions and biases. Notions of the future are both compelling and contested. It has been said that: • the future doesn’t exist (Gelatt, 1993); • the future arises, even if discontinuously, from the past and the present (Spies, 1997 as cited in van der Laan, 2008);
• the future is the only element of time that we can control (Masini, 2006); and • everyone has images of the “future” in their mind (de Jouvenel, 1967).
The laureates in my study created future possibilities while living and working in often extreme circumstances.
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Center for Business and Economic Insight
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