Foresight in Action by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Expertise as an anchor

Expertise can be seen as a synthesis of collective experience and experts as the embodiment of expertise. We witnessed that futurists draw upon expert judgement in instances of prospective uncertainty in the context of foresight. In line with the vocabulary proposed by van der Sluijs and colleagues (van der Sluijs, 1997; van der Sluijs et al, 1998), we refer to this use of uncertainty as expertise as an anchor.

In interviews as well as in the many meetings we attended, there were references to ‘expert judgement’. Confronted with uncertainty, futurists consider it important ‘to refer back to what others have done’ or said (Field notes, 14 December 2001), and ‘if you are uncertain about something, you consult each other’ (interview quote, van Asselt, 2000).7 We heard that ‘expert judgement is used to assess unknown relationships’, ‘you may have uncertainty … we discuss about it and an expert judgement is passed’ and ‘a large part of the input is expert judgement’ (interview quotes, van Asselt, 2000). The following excerpt of a discussion among futurists exemplifies the role of expert judgement in dealing with prospective uncertainty (Field notes, van Asselt, 2000):

Futurist F

You have to realize that it [dealing with prospective uncertainty] is a trick that we learned over time …

FUTURIST R

I may be too little concerned about the theory behind it; we are working intuitively.

FUTURIST J

Very intuitively.

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