Researching plausible futures : managing the process

Like other contributors to this festschrift I am sure, I owe Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt a considerable intellectual debt of gratitude. In my own case this flows from the opportunity that she provided for me to collaborate with her in exploring the vital nexus between learning, researching, process management and change. This collaboration was not simply an academic exercise. In addition to our shared passion for the intellectual foundations of action researching and experience-based learning as critical forms of human inquiry, we were, as we remain, also united in our commitment to putting such processes to practical use. This was most especially within a context of the strategic development of organisations and institutions. In particular, as we submitted in a co-authored piece nearly a quarter of a century ago, our appreciation of process management lay with its focus on change as well as its embrace of relationships rather than tasks, of its basis in human values, and, very significantly as it was to transpire particularly for me, of its orientation to the future. In this chapter, I explore some of the significance and also challenges of learning both for the future and especially from it that have become evident to me as I have further pursued their strategic significance. This progression of interest was certainly inspired and informed, at least in part, through my collaboration with Ortrun all those years ago. If we can learn to transform everyday lived experiences into informed action, as both experiential learning and action research insist, then it should be possible to translate what we might learn from experiences of futures that ‘can be imagined into being’ into informed strategic actions that are appropriate to the actual future that does unfold