Foresight and Asian Philosophy
(These are some brief reflections on a recent conversation with Alex Fergnani, author of The Dao of Foresight.)
Alex Fergnani originally came to China to study martial arts and ended up making his home in Asia. In addition to martial arts and other physical practices, he has studied futures studies and management in Taiwan and Singapore (for his MA and PhD), and currently divides his time between Manila and Singapore.
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I met Alex through a mutual friend, Daniel Tarpy, around the time he was finishing his book The Dao of Foresight (published last year). I recently had a chance to talk to Alex about his book and other topics of mutual interest. I personally became curious about scenario planning (a central theme of Alex’s book) through working with philosopher Jay Ogilvy (see Jay and Alex in conversation here) and am currently researching the influence of Daoism on 20th-century literature and philosophy. Alex and I certainly come at things from different perspectives, but our lives and interests intersect in fascinating ways.
Besides Asian philosophy, Alex and I are both interested in finding new ways to communicate complex ideas. Alex’s The Dao of Foresight is a fine example of this: an introduction to foresight practices (especially scenario planning) in the form of an wuxia (martial arts) novel. The novel is modeled on the trope of the troubled youth learning martial arts from an older master in order to defeat some villain or otherwise save the day (see, in American culture, The Karate Kid, plus countless examples in Chinese literature and cinema). In The Dao of Foresight, however, the youth learns foresight practices.
The Dao of Foresight is not simply a presentation of Western methods. It draws ideas from Daoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism, pointing out their compatibility and complementarity with the Western practice of scenario planning. (In fact, as Alex points out in his book and in our conversation, Pierre Wack, a major force in developing scenario planning, was strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism.) In his Appendix to the novel, Alex suggests that “the many combinations of hexagrams that the I Ching [an ancient Chinese text, a.k.a. Book of Changes] allows are essentially a primordial scenario planning method.” This immediately piqued my interest, and in our conversation I asked Alex to say more about the I Ching as a tool for thinking about the future. It turns out that Alex has been deeply exploring the I Ching since publishing The Dao of Foresight. It is, he says, a more personally meaningful way of approaching foresight than scenario planning, which has historically been oriented toward large organizations. This is a point on which I hope to focus more intensively in the future.
