Debiasing with foresight: A horizon scanning process on the digitalisation of research and policymaking

Research and policymaking organisations increasingly recognize the importance of digitalisation for both, their own operations and the transformations of their operating environment. The opaqueness and openness of digital developments ask for dealing with future uncertainty. However, biases distort the perception of changes and constrain the exploration of plausible and relevant alternative futures. This chapter explains and reflects how thinking about digital futures can be debiased with foresight. We present and discuss our conceptual design and empirical material building upon the three-year foresight project ‘Environmental research and governance in the digital age’ that we led as a contractor of the Federal Environment Agency. We co-designed a five-step horizon scanning process and integrated debiasing measures for each step thereby systematically mitigating six salient biases in futures thinking, among them the surveillance filter and the confirming trend bias. As a result, four success factors of debiasing with foresight stand out: eye-level foresight and digitalization competences of both the contracting authority and contractor; co-creation of the scan field definition thereby reflecting different impact pathways of digitalisation; multiple flexibly adopted horizon scanning approaches encompassing semiautomated scanning, human main and fringe source analysis, interviews with radical thinkers and targeted meta-engine search; participatory sensemaking to leverage diverse and controversial external views in tailoring the future topics and anticipating different digital future trajectories and emerging issues. The suggested debiasing measures are systematically and explicitly integrated into the horizon scanning to ensure the novelty, relevance and validity of dealing with uncertain digital futures. The process yielded a disaggregated and multi-perspective view of digitalisation with its future topics, subtopics, and related emerging issues. Such a strategic compass for research and policymaking can stimulate organisational learning through a common reference. It should be kept modifiable and amendable to account for new insights into the dynamically changing panoply of digital phenomena.