The following is a response to “Future Trends 2025″ from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf.)

Despite its goal of looking incisively at the next 17 years, its total inability to provide insight on the future is a danger to all of us. With our institutions failing at around one per week (!) it seems it’s time for a real discussion.

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The meltdown of the financial system; the collapse of the automotive industry; the impending bankruptcy of several American cities — these events tell even the casual observer that our institutions are weak when it comes to the ability to perceive and act on future trends. Most people might say that this is part of the human condition, the result of our natural short-term thinking in a complex, rapidly changing world. But this shortcoming of foresight is reaching a dangerous level that can no longer be considered acceptable. We must develop an institutional capability in the public and private sector to have frank, courageous discussions about the implications of strategic trends – and the actions they require – if we are to guide our society safely and prosperously into the years ahead.

A recent release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shows how pervasive the lack of a professional method of foresight has become, even in the places where we expect it and need it most. The ODNI just published a report entitled “Global Trends 2025,” a major effort of the nation’s sixteen intelligence agencies and several think tanks, supposedly intended to inform the new presidential administration. Given the resources committed to such an endeavor, one would expect the project to be a tour de force of professional foresight, a foil for stimulating discussion among leaders everywhere. Instead it is a cautionary tale of group think, narrowness of scope, and faulty methodology.

The content of the work offers little insight for those would guide our institutions in uncertain times. The summary of these global trends is: “By 2025, the accelerating pace of globalization and the emergence of new powers will produce a world order vastly different from the system in place for most of the post-World War II era.” In other words, the next seventeen years are unlikely to be like the last sixty years. This is not exactly “actionable intelligence.”

The individual trends detailed in the report are just as weak, combining unexamined assumptions and sclerotic analysis. Other projections in “Global Trends 2025″: include:

• “Russia’s emergence as a world power is clouded by lagging investment in its energy sector and the persistence of crime and government corruption.” Poverty, lack of investment and corruption in Russia has been going on for about 1000 years. What’s new?

• “A worldwide shift to a new technology that replaces oil will be under way or accomplished by 2025.” This is wishful thinking at best. The International Energy Agency’s recent forecast sees fossil fuels continuing to supply the vast majority of the world’s energy through 2030. This report offers vague hopes for biofuels, and assumes oil will be on the way out – a canyon-jumping leap of faith.

• “The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes.” This forecast has been written repeatedly, on a regular basis, for the past 50 years. What should we do differently?

• “The impact of climate change will be uneven, with some Northern economies, notably Russia and Canada, profiting from longer growing seasons and improved access to resource reserves.” This is a landmark entry in the annals of positive spin, and one that ignores that the most important part of global climate change will be the actions we take in response.

The bland, inaccurate and un-provocative content, shows that while these agencies go through the motions of a foresight methodology, they have lost the spirit of the exercise entirely. It was the threat of thermonuclear holocaust that led these very organizations in the 1960s to invent futures research in the first place. The tools of forecasting and scenarios were designed not for their capacity for prophecy, but to provoke an examination of our cherished – and potentially harmful – unexamined assumptions. To become lost in groupthink in 1960 was to perhaps lead our country aimlessly into nuclear annihilation. Foresight was intended to make us think while there was still time.

The DNI’s latest report seems to show that our intelligence agencies no longer study the future with rigor and intellectual stimulation as the goal. Instead, we see a view of the future that was agreed upon by committee: unoffensive, ambigious, and of minimal utility to leaders attempting to think deeply about the challenges to come.

A rigorous, courageous approach to foresight is no longer a luxury, reserved to times of plenty or relegated to philosophers. Leaders of all organizations – everywhere – must commit themselves to developing an organizational capacity to understand future trends, examine their impact completely, and to motivate others to action. To fail in this challenge is to continue to suffer the fate we see in our critical institutions today.