The art of anticipation should be an essential part of an organisation’s ethos, requiring a willingness to challenge preconceptions and be sensitive to changing contexts. However, anticipation is not about prediction. Rather, it is about a willingness to explore an array of future worlds in order to test an organisation’s capacities, and indeed willingness, to think more creatively and adapt accordingly. An effective organisation must avoid becoming trapped in the assumptions of the present, let alone those of the past. Exploring the “what might be’s” should become inherent in an organisation determined to be fit for an ever more complex future.

Adaptive capacities are closely linked to those of anticipation. In other words, will the responses of a futures-sensitive organisation still depend upon engrained standard operating procedures, siloed responses, unwillingness to abandon ‘comfort zones’ and an abiding concern with institutional survival? Alternatively, an organisation fit for the future must realise the importance of operational flexibility, cross-departmental collaboration, shared resources and more integrated decision-making processes. Ways to promote and maintain such capacities will be increasingly essential for ensuring:

• effective anticipatory risk management practices
• strategy development tested through a futures lens
• development of appropriate human resources

Innovations and innovative practices are of fundamental importance for an organisation determined to be fit for the future. For example,  a growing number of scientific and technological innovations have the potential to expand policy and decision-makers’ capacities to prevent, as well as anticipate and respond to ever more complex humanitarian crises. The challenge for those involved in humanitarian policy and practice is how to identify, prioritise, and implement innovation and innovative practices when the very nature of both can be so unpredictable. Despite these challenges, there are ways in which organisations can identify, prioritise and implement innovation and innovative practices more effectively than is the norm. These, too, should become engrained in the practices of an organisation fit for the future.

New forms of collaboration. The types, dimensions and dynamics of crisis threats are increasing. Their impacts will directly and indirectly affect a growing number of actors and sectors, and no single set of actors or sectors have the requisite capacities to deal with such threats on their own. With that in mind, collaborative partnerships and networks are essential to ensure adequate capacities to deal effectively with future threats, to enhance anticipation and adaptation, and to promote innovation and innovative practices. Solutions will increasingly need to reflect problem-solving networks — networks that accept the comparative advantages of its components and are willing to plan for the longer-term together.

Sensitive leadership requires moving beyond [linear hierarchy and] “managerialism”. Leaders will have to prepare for more diffuse forms of leadership where decisions directly affecting the organisation as a whole may be taken at different organisational levels. Ambiguity and uncertainty in an increasingly entangled world order will require leaders to ensure that organisations have deeply embedded anticipatory and adaptive skills. These must be reflected in strategic and operational planning processes. Leaders will need to have the tools to recognise and seize opportunities for innovation and bring together problem solving networks of a wide and varied range to achieve common objectives.

Ways to implement these organisational skills are outlined in the Key Findings section of this website. This provide in depth Humanitarian Futures Reports and Studies, a comprehensive Toolkit, and a concise collection of Flashpoints Findings.

• Humanitarian Reports and Studies offers strategic and operational analyses on the challenges that need to be faced to deal with ever more complex humanitarian threats. It focuses principally on the strengths and weaknesses of a wide range of governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations in their attempts to identify and prepare for plausible future threats.
• Humanitarian Futures Toolkit provides tests to enable organisations to determine their capacities for anticipating future humanitarian threats, and methodologies designed to strengthen organisational approaches for dealing with such threats.
• Humanitarian Futures Flashpoints comprise of a series of innovations, systems developments, plausible future vulnerabilities, and well regarded response initiatives to provide further insights into planning from the future.

The website also has an extensive Library which in part is designed to supplement the capacities found in Key Findings as well as to provide easy access to all of Humanitarian Futures work.

The Humanitarian Futures website is the product of the Humanitarian Futures Programme, launched in 2004 at King’s College, London. Since its inception, it has worked with 28 governments, 26 intergovernmental and regional organisations and 32 non-governmental organisations as well as a variety of local communities, a wide range of organisations in the private sector and research institutions. Together, they reflect work undertaken in East and West Africa, Europe, North and South America and East and South East Asia.