Laboratoire Européen d’Anticipation Politique founds its work on an original method: “Political Anticipation”.
Imagine a sailboat at sea heading to a harbour with icebergs and tempests on its way and dealing with winds, waves and streams… That’s what each of us, whether a citizen or a CEO, is in the steam of time.
Political anticipation is about setting oneself one simple goal (the harbour), anticipating obstacles (icebergs and tempests) and understanding long-, medium- and short-term trends (winds, waves and streams). The understanding of these trends is key (“anticipation”) but you also need to decide how to place your boat, sails, strings, weight… (“political”) for these to become your allies in reaching the harbour.
More practically, the Method of Political Anticipation is a very accessible and common-sensical set of advices based on the assertion that the human being must be aware of his connection to and influence on the future and learn to control better this power. These advices include :
–> understanding of the object of study (long-term trends, short-term trends, breaking points, trend accelerators/decelerators
–> optimal information (combining across disciplines languages-national background-social groups sources of information)
–> optimal anchorage in trans-national societal reality (through Internet and networking and awareness of one’s point of observation)
–> required state of mind (independence, courage, objectivity)
–> scientificity of the study (production of hypotheses, validation processes, evaluation)[1]
Political anticipation is intended to both policy makers and citizens as a tool of democracy in a complex world where the future is invasive and in which everyone has to enhance his/her capacity to judge the many future scenarios constantly served to him/her.
Today this method of Political Anticipation is:
. applied monthly to the global political and economic news in the LEAP’s bulletin, the GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin (GEAB)
. taught in school at INSEEC, LEAP Academy,…
. presented in the Manual of Political Anticipation, published by Anticipation Publishings
. developed in various articles, namely:
- M-H Caillol, Political anticipation: observing and understanding global socio-economic trends with a view to guide the decision-making processes, under the direction of Professor Mihai Nadin (International Journal of General Systems, Special issue on Anticipation, Vol 41 Number 1 January 2012 – ISSN: 0308-1079), Taylor&Francis, 2012
- M-H Caillol, Political Anticipation and Networks: Creating Anticipatory Systems for Government and Society, excerpt from Anticipation Across Disciplines, Editor Mihai Nadin (Cognitive systems Monograph 29 – ISSN: 1867-4925), Springer, 2016
- M-H Caillol, Political Anticipation: A human-centred method, under the direction of Professor Roberto Poli (in Handbook of Anticipation – Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Use of Future in Decision Making), Springer, due 2020