Guest editors’ notes

Abstract

The pandemic was an important wake-up call for evaluators to be forward-thinking and anticipate (and prepare for) the unexpected. Society was caught off guard and the consequences were devastating. Evaluators were no exception and were similarly trapped in hindsight thinking. In a rapidly changing world, evaluators need to learn from futures studies, the discipline, and foresight, the capacity or competency to think creatively and strategically about the future drawing on a range of methods, such as trends assessments, scenario writing, Delphi survey, and Futures Wheel (Shallowe et al., 2020). This will enable evaluators to work with their clients to be able to think about possible futures and how they might be enabled, avoided, mitigated, or exploited. Evaluators need to develop nimble, forward-thinking designs for interventions that can be responsive to change while also helping evaluators future-proof their theories, findings, and recommendations. Similar to cultivating their "evaluative thinking" skills, evaluators need to increase their own "futures literacy" and develop the capability to anticipate and "use the future" (Miller, 2018). This entails understanding there are different kinds of futures which enables one to anticipate change and take action.At the field level, this requires a shift in orientation away from "rear view mirror" thinking and assessing a program or policy ex post with limited thought to how to increase a program's resilience in the face of great change. As Carden (2023) argues, because evaluators focus on data from past experiences they are almost by definition trapped in the past and develop evaluation findings and recommendations that are an extension of the past and often fail to incorporate novelty and changing context. In practice, evaluators can no longer assume projects will continue as is and they must replace their aspirational sense of reality with one that is significantly "post-normal" and often complex and chaotic (Schwandt, 2019). This means that simple theories of change and methods characterized by linear "if then" thinking neglect consideration of larger forces for change commonly referred to as "drivers" and a wider awareness of "weak signals" that are just emerging.Meanwhile (and serendipitously), foresight practitioners are recognizing that for their work to be effective and be viewed as credible they must focus on assessing process, outcomes, and impacts. While the futures studies discipline is decades old and has academic programs, multiple professional associations, professional competency standards, and government-based foresight departments, a perennial concern of futurists and foresight practitioners is whether foresight work is having the desired impact. Futurists going back to the 1980s have argued that systematic evaluation can improve the quality and effectiveness of foresight, benefitting clients and the profession (Ko & Yang, 2024; van der Steen & van der Duin, 2012). These concerns are echoed by Gardner and Bishop (2019) in the themed issue on foresig...