Michel Crozier, sociologist and member of the Institute

The Foresight Interviews is a research project commissioned by the Laboratoire d’Investigation en Prospective, Stratégie et Organisation (Lipsor) at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) under the direction of Professor Michel Godet.
The charter of this research is to conduct interviews with prominent futurists, and in so doing, promoting and diffusing the concepts and foundations of la prospective (foresight) whether they be French, European or international.
This project began because of the inaccessibility of work in foresight which had been done over the last 50 years (unavailable texts or those completely forgotten— scattered about by publishers and archivists alike). This unavailability is a major source of ignorance by current practitioners concerning the state of the art and the underlying fundamentals of foresight.
To pursue this objective we shall reconstruct the « intellectual capital » of la prospective with the aim of clarifying the present as well as the discipline of foresight itself.
The collection and management of this intellectual capital will be done by a core group of prospectivists in France, among them those active in Datar, the Futuribles group, the French General Planning Commission, and Lipsor. Their ongoing mission will be; to make these sources available, to optimize resources, and to ensure the greatest possible distribution of these sources. This organization is a cooperative and learning network which will likely grow beyond the initial partners.
Finally, this work will favour the establishment of criteria for the evaluation of projects which is all the more necessary today in the culture of projects which is being instituted at the highest levels of government.
The Foresight Interviews are part of this process. Their objective is to identify, through the direct testimony of important futurists, the important historical concepts and ideas which developed during the emergence of the modern practice of foresight in France and around the world.

See the French version