A Map with No Edges: Ramifications of Future Operating Environments

A rigorous and more expansive approach to exploring our future operating environments is necessary for more effective foresight and ultimately, policy making. Despite some of our deepest wishes, there is not a single "future of conflict" that we can discern with clarity and confidence; rather, signals today suggest that there is an expanding range of possibilities. Framing our exploration of future challenges, requirements, and opportunities through this lens produces some valuable consequences for planners and policy makers.

Richard Lum is an academically trained futurist and chief executive of Vision Foresight Strategy LLC (VFS), a foresight and strategic analysis firm based in Honolulu. He has conducted foresight and strategy work on projects for organizations such as U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, the European Commission, the UK government, the Canadian government, the Singaporean government, NASA, and PepsiCo. Mr. Lum is the author of 4 Steps to the Future: A Quick and Clean Guide to Creating Foresight and his contributions were featured in the books Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (2006), A Careful Revolution (2019), Rethinking Asia 7: The Future of Work (2020), and Strategic Latency Unleashed: A SOF Perspective (2020, forthcoming). He has been published in the Journal of Futures Studies, the journal Futures, International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, World Future Review, and Small Wars Journal. Richard is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the futures studies program at the University of Hawaii. His dissertation research focused on developing a conceptual framework for designing future governance systems.