"People in Britain have many differences, but they inhabit the same space and share the same future. All have a role in the collective project of fashioning Britain as an outward-looking, generous, inclusive society." - Parekh Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain - October 02000 http://www.runnymedetrust.org/meb/TheReport.htm

"I think part of the increased awareness in long-term thinking is the increasing life span of some people. If the eight-year-old in a couple of years starts to assume that 150 to 200 years is a plausible lifespan, personally, that's going to change thinking and probably behavior. People never used to know their great-grandparents. Now everybody does. That will go on to great-great-grandparents. In turn, they're going to know their own great-great-grandkids. What's life going to be like for them? What will I do now about that? I think that that, in addition to science, creates a personal lengthening of the frame of reference. The "now" of one's life is extending. Things will change around that." - Stewart Brand, November 2001 http://www.longnow.org/

""Now" is the period in which people feel they live and act and have responsibility. For most of us, "now" is about a week, sometimes a year. For some traditional tribes in the American northeast and Australia, "now" is seven generations back and forward (350 years). Just as the Earth photographs gave us a sense of "the big here," we need things which gives people a sense of "the long now." (That phrase comes from British musician and artist Brian Eno.) - Stewart Brand, Re-framing the problems, 01996

"The only relevant questions about the future are those where we succeed from shifting the question from whether something will happen to what we would do if it did happen" - Arie de Geus via http://www.shell.com

"Scenario planning is a discipline for rediscovering the original entrepreneurial power of creative foresight in contexts of accelerated change, greater complexity, and genuine uncertainty." —Pierre Wack, Royal Dutch/Shell, 1984 

"Seriousness about the future...at the moment fear and uncertainty are leading to some strange reactions. We have few institutional frameworks for serious thinking about what the future is bringing. But a more uncertain world makes it all the more essential to lock future{s?} thinking not only into firms' {organisations?} strategies but also into the thinking of governments. As a counterweight to the nervous hyperactivity of modern news and financial markets and as an alternative to glib invocations of chaos theory, we need to cultivate the habit of long-term thinking all the more. Failure to do this threatens business with perpetual anxiety, as crises explode over everything from the contents of food to mis-selling of products." - Geoff Mulgan & Perri 6, Demos 6/1996

"Long-termism rejects the hedonism of Keynes, who famously proclaimed, 'In the long run we are all dead'. When Keynes voiced his familiar epigram, the formidable Joan Robinson replied, 'No Maynard, in the long run run each of us is dead'. A ready awareness of the connections between past, present and future can be found in subjects as homely as botany. To live with the inheritance of public policy, Britain needs fewer specialists in making policy by sound bites and more trained in forestry, or at least having the temperament to plant trees" - Richard Rose, Demos 6/1996

"Images of the future have always played a central role in human affairs. The nature of these images has differed substantially over time and in different cultures, but individuals, organisations and states have always needed some image of the future. That image can present the future as something that happens to them or something that they can actively create.

The common element in thinking about the future is always a desire in some way to increase control. Peter Schwarz,..., puts it very directly in the first paragraph of his recent book, The art of the long view. The book', he writes 'is about freedom'. What he means is that without an understanding or an exploration {an essential distinction...} of what the future might hold we lack the freedom to make the most of our opportunities and to control our destinies...The key change is one from planning as a process to generate understanding, to planning as exploration and creation. If you haven't a clue what's going to happen and infinite flexibility is neither attainable nor consonant with human and corporate nature, then all you have left is to articulate your vision and strive to realise it. Clearly that vision has to be intelligent and rational...The ...mantra is that winners {evolvers?} will be those who have discovered the strongest sense of purpose. The injunction is to decide who you are, believe in it with passion...and things should start to happen for you. What this approach starts from is a recognition that we live in extraordinarily fluid times. In many, if not most, situations today there is a much greater range of possible futures...Now its not just 'how should the corporation {how should we} adapt to the environment' but rather 'how does the corporation {how do we} need to adapt the environment in order to achieve its objectives?'...This development from a passive to an active mode of planning has its analogue in the social sciences. Many social and natural scientists are moving away from deterministic and reductionist stances for their disciplines. They are accepting that the future is plural and that outcomes are not even in principle determined independently of the actions of agenct...Waiting to see what the logic of events dictates is, perhaps less sensible today than ever before." - Bob Tyrrell, Demos 8/1996