In 1968, at the Mexico City Games, the first Olympics held in Latin America, Dick Fosbury won gold in the high jump by going over the bar backwards, while everyone else was still jumping the way it had always been done. He cleared an Olympic record of 2.24 metres. The part those who tell this story tend to skip is why it worked. Until the 1960s, high jumpers landed in sand or sawdust, and you could not throw yourself over backwards without risking your neck. Then deep foam replaced the sand. A move that had always been impossible was suddenly just strange-looking, and Fosbury was the one who dared to try it. He didn’t invent new physics. He understood that the ground beneath the bar had changed, and acted on it before the rest of the field caught up.

Development is facing a similar moment, and that is why I have just spent three days in Panama practising strategic foresight with sixty colleagues from across Latin America and the Caribbean. Partway through, looking at a deck of foresight methods, each step arriving neatly after the last, I found myself uneasy. It read as too tidy: do this, and you get that. Real foresight is not like that, and pretending it is does people a disservice, because the methods can go wrong. Scenarios especially can be dangerous. So I told them a story I don’t enjoy telling.

A few years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, my team presented a set of scenarios to a senior audience, and it did not land. They heard predictions, us telling them this is what will happen, when we meant something else entirely: a way to pressure-test our thinking against a range of possibilities. Some of those futures were uncomfortable, and the room decided they simply weren’t plausible.

Part of that was on us. A scenario is not a prediction, and when a room hears a prediction, it usually means we framed it badly. Plausibility is not something you hand to people. You build it with them, in the room, or you don’t get it at all. That is what shaped how we worked in Panama.

The futurist Wendy Schultz puts something I keep returning to: “The most important future is the future the greatest number of people believe in most: it is the future on which they are basing their decisions and actions.” When enough people believe in a particular future, they act on it today, and those actions nudge the world in its direction. So the future that wins is not always the likeliest one. It is the one people are willing to bet on, the one the greatest number believe in most. Which is why trust and legitimacy are not insignificant in foresight and development work. They are much of what decides where we actually end up.

Working together, the conversation moved beyond uncertainty and planning horizons toward the deeper questions underneath: who development is really for, what it means to be human in the futures we are walking into, and — hardest of all — whether development cooperation has a future at all. You do not go there unless you care about the answer.

I think the answer is yes. But not the version we have spent decades improving. As with the high jump, the future will belong to whoever is willing to try the strange-looking thing. That is what foresight is for: not to predict what is coming, but to help us find the approaches that do not yet exist, before circumstances force them on us. The pressures on the old model are real, and improving it alone will not get us where we need to go. It is outliving the world it was built for.

I arrived in Panama expecting to share my experience in applying foresight to international development. I left with greater hope: that development’s next breakthrough will come not from doing the old things better, but from finding its own Fosbury Flop: seeing that the ground beneath us has shifted, and daring to try what that makes possible.