Summary
Koffi M. Kouakou is a senior lecturer in government communications and scenario planning and former programme director of the Unilever Mandela Rhodes Academy (UMRA) at the Wits School of Governance, formerly the Graduate School of Public and Development Management (P&DM) at Wits UNiversity. He is also a Long Now futurist, author and social commentator. He is a former co-director of CSIR Virtual Reality Solutions and a small business strategist. He also coordinated the World Bank initiative on environmental information systems initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa in Washington and Pretoria.
Source: Millennium Project
OnAir Post: Koffi Kouakou
About
Interview
“Scenarios are an extraordinary exercise of breathing in and breathing out. You take a big breath in of what is happening in the world and breath out an image of the future.”
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with self proclaimed measured optimist Koffi Kouakou—senior lecturer on scenario planning at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa Long Now futurist, author, storyteller and social commentator—to chat about foresight. In honor of this month’s focus on peace and foresight the interview tended to veer in that direction.
The interview opened with a conversation about why we care about the future. According to Koffi, the beauty and importance of thinking about the future is that “hope and possibilities are the currencies of the future. If you don’t have both of them, you have no future, or the one you construct will be terrible. You of course have to have the low road with the high road, but most great futurists have to be optimists because you need to know you are going to be alive or better futures will unfold. Futures really mean something to systems that are alive. There is always some light in the future, do we have a chance to live again?”
He says that he is a “rebel rouser of the mind about the future. I’m a brick in their minds; I just hit them so hard about the world. Anybody who doesn’t think about the future is standing still, and that is a call of death, you just don’t grow. The future stretches you forward and makes your mind think ‘omg, I’m going somewhere and I’m about to reach somewhere better.’” Yes! This is good news to me, but I wonder if there is a way to prove this empirically since we live in a world where statistics and numbers matter. In building a Foresight for Peace initiative, is it enough to go to organizations with anecdotal description of the powers of foresight to change a mindset from a destructive one, to one that seeks to live in the future and therefore build a positive foundation? Unfortunately, to date there is no empirical research that has proved what all foresight practitioners know. We simply have the stories of experiences like what Koffi described above.
Source: Foresight for Development
