Foresight
Sara Robinson who posts at Group News Blog and at Orcinus has a new post over at The Campaign for America’s Future blog that should be a must read for everyone interested in what has happened in the US these past 3 decades, America has lost it’s legendary ability to plan for the long term, and this loss was not accidental by any means
Foresight is power. Organization and planning create the future. Those who have mastered these skills greatly increase the odds that they’ll be the ones to choose the future for everyone else. And therein lies the problem.
Corporate leaders understand this power. (So does the religious right, which is why the largest department of strategic foresight in the country is now emerging at Pat Robertson’s Regent University. They’ve got a vision for the future, and are getting very systematic about implementing it.) Short-circuiting government’s capacity to exercise any kind of planning or foresight (or, importantly, oversight) on behalf of the people was a core piece of their rise to power. The War on Science that Chris Mooney so amply documents was accompanied, in a much lower key, by a War on Planning that gutted all the various methods the government used to develop large-scale plans, track leading indicators, and detect and adjust for disruptions.
And so it was that the thousands of public employees around the country who kept track of trends in labor, public health, ecosystems, water, soil, weather, and so on just sort of went away — defunded or discouraged at the behest of business patrons whose interests were threatened by the things these observers recorded. The engineers tasked with maintaining our existing infrastructure and planning future improvements were pushed to retire, or found jobs in the private sector. The land use commissions in charge of enforcing long-term regional plans were just another obstacle to building strip malls and big box stores, and either bought off or sued into compliance. The massive strategic and logistical efforts that supported the military were outsourced to Halliburton. The accountants who might have totted up the extra costs these changed inflicted on taxpayers (though they were almost universally sold as money-saving efficiency measures) were dismissed — sometimes metaphorically, often literally.
Sara has really nailed it. I couldn’t agree more with her post.
[tags]field of dreams, foresight, planning, strategic planning[/tags]
