What is Integral Foresight?

This book collects some of Richard Slaughter’s articles on two urgent topics: the practice of foresight and the Integral approach which we refer to as “Integral Foresight”. Short, succinct, and representing a whole new field of inquiry, the articles are presented largely in their original form.

The book does not need to be read from beginning to end. Instead, rather like its subject matter – foresight and the Integral approach – it explores key dimensions of the world we inhabit. Some of these are inner in nature: the self, the mind and the subjective experience. Others are outer: the world viewed as systems of culture and nature.

The Integral approach attempts a unification of everything our knowledge quest as a species has thus far produced. In order to understand the broadest possible picture, it includes the inner and outer dimensions from individual and collective perspectives. In so doing we can make wiser decisions for the ever-present future. It is a demanding task, to say the least, but one must start somewhere. This anthology offers points of departure for those who aspire to big picture thinking.

Dr. Richard Slaughter, a British-Australian pioneer of futures studies, has achieved the difficult task of bringing together two contested epistemologies in a believable manner. Neither foresight as a practice, nor the Integral approach as an orienting principle are for the faint hearted or the soulfully timid. They require that we plunge into the unknown territories of the not-yet-here and the not-sure-how. From these ragged and uncertain origins Slaughter has woven a corpus of work, beginning in the early 1980’s, that embodies a more comprehensive way of understanding our future. Many of his themes – like the moral debt we owe to future generations – are not necessarily new but are divulged to perceptive minds in many places and at various times.

Or to put this differently one of Richard Slaughter’s key contributions has been to introduce what we might call “the other half of reality” to Futures Studies and applied foresight. He has successfully argued for the inner dimension of mind and its developmental levels to be as central as the technical, systemic and concrete reality the field was initially founded upon. As an integral thinker in his own right, Richard Slaughter has added to the canon of Integral applications, urging us to adopt a wider, deeper and more holistic approach in understanding futures, effectively producing the field of Integral Futures. This, in turn, facilitates the emergence of Integral foresight in practitioners. It has been a long road, and we in the foresight and integral communities are better off for it. We should be grateful for these efforts, since the road is now rather more travelled than it was three or four decades ago.

This endeavour has demanded a particular set of strengths, innovative capacities and abilities that were required to enable the synthesis of two not-so-well-known worlds: futures studies and Integral theory. In my own professional work as a consultant and coach, I often look for abilities that a singular coaching client or a whole organisation needs to develop to go move from their current way of being into a new broader and more capable way of being. In what follows I highlight some of the specific capabilities that characterise Slaughter’s approach to helping Futures Studies and applied foresight move from a broadly non-Integral stance to a more Integrally informed one.

Integral Theory has been applied to over 70 disciplines, from fishery supply chain development, psychiatry and mindfulness to Futures Studies. There are crucial factors for success in such efforts. First, intellectually, one must know what one is applying and where. Second, emotionally, one should be willing to withstand the personal and social strains of being a pioneer. Third, in an embodied manner, one should have an open mind, heart and will to combine two relatively novel fields of inquiry. In attempting to do just that Richard Slaughter took on a sizeable challenge. For the most part, he has not only succeeded, but also furthered our knowledge of what it means when two worlds at the leading edge of conceptual evolution collide. For anyone attempting to apply Integral theory to a professional or academic field, these capacities can function as a checklist for what is needed to be successful, or at the very least, to make headway in forging the raw iron of flatland into a multi-dimensional tool of applied integral wisdom.

1. The capacity to interpret Integral in a nuanced manner.

Distinguishing what actually constitutes Integral from more superficial interpretations is a key skill in applying the Integral Theory. This is evident throughout Slaughter’s writings. In order to apply Integral Theory and thinking, one should be hermeneutically prepared to sustain the original difficulty of the subject. Throughout his writings, Richard Slaughter has succeeded in this task. This is evident already in an earlier article where Slaughter points out a central feature of Integral developmental theory is easily missed by less shrewd observers. That is, instead of viewing transpersonal aspirations as the next step, the world first needs universal reason, the stage of rationality and scientific thinking. This is timely, as the pre-rational mentality has not only been fortified but also promoted by many Western statesmen and leaders during the past few years.

2. The capacity to delve into the interior dimensions of the mind.

Instead of seeing the future as merely a future state of things, systems or processes, we need a broader framework to ensure that the default mode of futures thinking is not merely a ‘future without interiors.’ The bold introduction of the other half of reality, without which the future would be limited to an empirical preoccupation with surfaces without no inner dimension at all, is – literally – a lifesaver as life is manifest through all four quadrants (see Sean Hargens’ primer on Integral Theory). After the long reign of postmodernist reductionism, we still seem to suffer from a form of “altitude sickness” or a what we might call “level negligence,” where not only the inner dimension, but also the all-important gradation of the inner stages of development, (i.e. the levels of interiority and the views from those levels) are ignored, and placed outside of discourse altogether. Such unexamined cultural assumptions are an unacknowledged problem for much of futures writing. In arguing for societal evolution and progress to focus on individuals being committed to their own inner transformation and growth, Slaughter steers the conversation toward the vital, but often neglected, generic domain upon which our species survival depends: our inner world with its many levels, worldviews and dimensions.

3. The capacity for Big Question thinking.

If one were to ask layperson what people do when they do futures studies or foresight, the answer would be possibly along the lines of what philosopher Wesley Wildman labels ‘Big Question Philosophy’. Slaughter suggests that the field ask more world-centric, civilisational questions, those that really matter. He goes on to question the implications of foresight practitioners plying their trade without locating it more explicitly in a clear understanding of the unstable global context. Seen in this light, it is as if we were tuning the instruments of the band that plays on the sinking Titanic! Slaughter steers us away from the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, whereby we treat as important only that which we can study with the natural sciences, and towards the essential existential questions that should constitute more of the intellectual terrain of Futures Studies and applied foresight.

4. The capacity to co-create, sustain, and co-evolve strong systemic Lower Right and Lower Left components.

Examples of how Slaughter has sought to establish Integral Futures as a viable discipline can be found in a variety of articles, journals, books, editorial work, participation in organisations, workshops, symposiums, seminars and, of course, setting up the Australian Foresight Institute at Swinburne University in Melbourne in 1999. This Lower Right component requires a conglomerate skill of intellectual, social and institutional intelligence (if there is one!). To produce a societal structure around a new paradigm entails the ability the retain and understand the older paradigm(s), and to use existing features in order to hold a space for the new to emerge. This implies a new culture and new ways of conversing, both of which provide opportunities for the Lower Left or cultural interior space to arise through these institutions. As all quadrants emerge together, it is essential for any new intellectual adventure to consciously include as many components as possible from these perspectives.

5. The capacity to further professional discourse by introducing a new paradigm.

As evident by what came to be called the ‘Integral Futures Controversy'(stirred by a special issue of the Futures journal on Integral Futures (Vol 40, 2, 2008)) an Integral approach to futures enquiry and practice did, at one stage, create suspicion and critical comment. One of the capacities needed to withhold such criticism includes courage in defending a perspective which one sees as containing more truth than narrower approaches. This is bound to ruffle some academic feathers, as scientists and others do not particularly enjoy being ‘outcontextualised’. However, when one has experienced the Integral toothpaste, it is hard to un-experience it, or put it back into the tube. The depth vision it enables, however, can cause one to be permanently ill at ease with narrower perspectives. However, if one has sufficiently understood and embraced Integral Theory, this being- ill-at-ease will normally lead to greater empathy for narrower frames. In my reading, Slaughter has presented a balanced approach towards less-than-Integral worldviews, while remaining firm in his Integral stance.

6. The capacity to take an existentially melioristic stance.

Richard Slaughter approaches the canvas of futures studies from the perspective of possibilities, change and what the philosopher Nicholas Rescher calls the pragmatics of betterment. This is clear in the call for people to re-define their reality and respond to their deeper needs, the wish to see the growth of wisdom and foresight in all of world’s culture and the wish to see morality and ethics more widely applied, lest an ecocatastrophe overrun us. Slaughter sees the purpose of futures studies as a vehicle for going beyond the humdrum, with a planetary and civilisationally coherent vision, that helps us to live in a deeper, broader, unbounded present. As Slaughter puts it in one of his articles, this evokes a “human agenda inspired by the perennial tradition yet reinterpreted by changing human needs”. These are the words of a prophet disguised as a theorist, which is exactly the hybrid form we need in creating wisdom cultures and futures beyond dystopia. We need, as individuals and as a species, credible sources that inspire us to work toward better, more meaningful and wiser futures. But Slaughter is also a pragmatist. He calls for futures and foresight work to step outside of the shadows of administrative, organisational, and business contexts, and into the arena where it matters most: to the wider world of public education, media discourse, and local governance.

7. The capacity to intuit an Integral universe.

Existence can be approached either from a dry-biscuit or from a plum-cake perspective, from a flatland of exterior surfaces or from an integral multidimensional chain of being, which, to paraphrase philosopher A.N. Whitehead, was the official philosophy of humankind until the early 20th century. The latter approach is, if not inherent, then more available to others, or chosen by some, or consciously cultivated, as it is one of those things that are too good not to be true. This capacity, or a tendency for intuiting such a plum-cake vision of reality, is one the hallmarks of Slaughter’s approach. This sensitivity is a red thread running from his earlier articles, where real progress regarding external threats is measured in terms of internal growth, to more recent works, where Slaughter invites the reader to re-assess the theory and practice of Futures Studies and applied foresight. In his view it no longer makes sense to continue working within a few limited focal domains, where the lack of interest and capacity for engaging with inner realities make for a very dry-biscuit future indeed.
I hope, by reading this book, some of these capacities – along with the intellectual information – might rub off on you, dear reader, and leave you with a taste of the plum-cake universe, pointing you towards a new and more integral way of being. Our future needs your evolution – and vice versa.

JP Jakonen, PhD
Integral Foresight Finland, CEO
Reposaari, Finland
July 2023