Thank you for this discussion and for the initial ideas shared!
As someone who consistently puts "forward-looking evaluation" at the centre of my proposals, I want to offer a provocation.
The framing here might suggest that what evaluation needs is better foresight tools and more capacity to anticipate the future. I'd like to challenge that, not to dismiss foresight, but to locate the real problem one level up. Because the issue is not technical. It is cultural.
The deeper question is: what is evaluation for? If it exists mainly to confirm compliance (i.e. to verify that a plan was executed as designed, that the Theory of Change held....) then adding foresight methods changes nothing. We will simply be anticipating the future in service of the same backward-looking logic and the same set of horizons. Always in "compliance mode."
Before we ask how evaluation can get better at anticipating the future, we need to ask a prior question: are we willing to set evaluation free from the obligation to confirm the plan?
Can evaluation be exploration, not verification? That means evaluations that do not just answer questions, but discover better ones, that help people think through the future, not spoon-feed it to them.
Foresight tools are valuable. I have used them. And when used in a participatory way they can be liberating, revealing that people already carry vision and insights that the very plans they are working on tend to constrain.
So this is the real issue. It is not "foresight" as a technical fix. It is about the power to adapt, challenge, and explore continuously.... rather than situating evaluation in a world where our assumptions, our theories, our plans are reference points, and not starting ideas.
RE: From Hindsight to Foresight: How Evaluation Can Become Future-Informed
Italy
Silva Ferretti
Freelance consultant
Posted on 25/03/2026
Thank you for this discussion and for the initial ideas shared!
As someone who consistently puts "forward-looking evaluation" at the centre of my proposals, I want to offer a provocation.
The framing here might suggest that what evaluation needs is better foresight tools and more capacity to anticipate the future. I'd like to challenge that, not to dismiss foresight, but to locate the real problem one level up. Because the issue is not technical. It is cultural.
The deeper question is: what is evaluation for? If it exists mainly to confirm compliance (i.e. to verify that a plan was executed as designed, that the Theory of Change held....) then adding foresight methods changes nothing. We will simply be anticipating the future in service of the same backward-looking logic and the same set of horizons. Always in "compliance mode."
Before we ask how evaluation can get better at anticipating the future, we need to ask a prior question: are we willing to set evaluation free from the obligation to confirm the plan?
Can evaluation be exploration, not verification? That means evaluations that do not just answer questions, but discover better ones, that help people think through the future, not spoon-feed it to them.
Foresight tools are valuable. I have used them. And when used in a participatory way they can be liberating, revealing that people already carry vision and insights that the very plans they are working on tend to constrain.
So this is the real issue. It is not "foresight" as a technical fix. It is about the power to adapt, challenge, and explore continuously.... rather than situating evaluation in a world where our assumptions, our theories, our plans are reference points, and not starting ideas.