People in business can use foresight to identify new products and services, as well as markets for those products and services. An increase in minority populations in a neighborhood would prompt a grocer with foresight to stock more foods linked to ethnic tastes. (41) {{U}}An art museum director with foresight might follow trends in computer graphics to make exhibits more appealing to younger visitors.{{/U}}
Foresight may reveal potential threats that we can prepare to deal with before they become crises. (42) {{U}}For instance, a capable corporate manager might see an alarming rise in local housing prices that could affect the availability of skilled workers in the region. {{/U}}The public's changing values and priorities, as well as emerging technologies, demographic shifts, economic constraints (or opportunities ), and environmental and resource concerns are all parts of the increasingly complex world system in which leaders must lead.
(43) {{U}}People in government also need foresight to keep systems running smoothly, to plan budgets, and to prevent wars.{{/U}} Government leaders today must deal with a host of new problems emerging from rapid advances in technology.
Even at the community level, foresight is critical：school officials, for example, need foresight to assess numbers of students to accommodate, numbers of teachers to hire, new educational technologies to deploy, and new skills for students (and their teachers) to develop.
(44) {{U}}Many of the best-known techniques for foresight were developed by government planners, especially in the military, "thinking about the unthinkable".{{/U}} Pioneering futurists at the RAND Corporation (the first " think tank ") began seriously considering what new technologies might emerge in the future and how these might affect U. S. security. These pioneering futurists at RAND, along with others elsewhere, refined a variety of new ways for thinking about the future.
(45) {{U}}The futurists recognized that the future world is continuous with the present world, so we can learn a great deal about what may happen in the future by looking systematically at what is happening now.{{/U}}