Building the future: Undertaking proactive strategy for national outlook Ali Asghar Pourezzat a, *, Abdolazim Mollaee b , Morteza Firouzabadi c a Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran b Faculty of Management, Qom College, University of Tehran, Qom, Iran c Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mazandaran University of Science and Technology, Mazandaran, Iran ARTICLE INFO Available online 22 July 2008 ABSTRACT Future studies should provide the means to forecast potential crisis in order to avoid them or limit their effects [Masini, E. 2006, Rethinking futures studies, Futures 38, 1158-1168]. Recognizing and realizing the future events from past up to the present have been the main concern of the rulers and policy makers from the very beginning of civilization. Future studies are a decisive part of the public decision process which plays a very distinctive role in the desirable future of a society. The role of elites in future studies and scenario building is notable; they design national policies and strategies and have a significant impact in general public. Although future cannot be foretold by anyone, the interactions of advanced nations seem to be counter productive; they try to depict the futures. In this case, the futures are built, not predicted. The interactions of two or more systems at the level of international relations have been discussed in this paper. The imaginations of general public toward the futures are given in each society by using these analogies: railroad, river, sea and game. Therefore, the intervention of advanced nations may confront passive, harmonic, active, proactive and chaotic reaction in the other nations. We have discussed that undertaking proactive strategy is the best way to design national perspective. ß 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Most cultures have had some form of divination which promised to foretell future events. The most famous was probably the Delphic Oracle that advised rulers and common people alike on their fate and the implications of their choices. The Oracle, though very successful, was probably nothing more than modern day astrologers and fortune tellers, giving sufficiently vague pronouncements so that people could read into them whatever they wished [1]. Recognizing and realizing the future events from past up to the present have been the main concern of rulers and policy makers from the beginning of civilization. Scientific study of the future events has already been accomplished in future studies centers worldwide. Future studies are not fully developed when taken to mean the policy makers’ concerns about the future of a society (that is to say a more distant perspective than the one used for planning) and possibly integrating the construction of scenarios [2]. Scenario planning is a process-oriented approach to strategy, which takes an unpredictable view of the world, but acknowledges that some events and trends may be predictable [3]. Based on their information gathering, policy makers set out to create and analyze several scenarios about the future. Scenario planning helps societies look into the future and anticipate events and trends, understand risk, provide ideas for desirable futures by identifying new strategic options, and help politicians break out of their established mental models as they become aware of alternate future possibilities. Future studies involves the possibility of looking into the future at various levels in order to better understand the changing Futures 40 (2008) 887–892 * Corresponding author. Present address: Faculty of Management, Nasr Bridge, Tehran, Iran. Tel.: +98 21 6111 7665; fax: +98 21 8800 6477. E-mail addresses: pourezzat@ut.ac.ir (A.A. Pourezzat), a.mollaee@qc.ut.ac.ir (A. Mollaee), m.firouzabadi@ustmb.ac.ir (M. Firouzabadi). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Futures journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/futures 0016-3287/$ – see front matter ß 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2008.07.024