From Foresight to Practice: Building the Capacity to Think About the Future Inside Government at the Digital Agency of Japan

The Digital Agency was established in 2021 as a central government organization responsible for driving digital transformation across the Japanese government. While individual ministries are responsible for their respective policy areas, the Agency plays a cross-government role in transforming public services, building common digital infrastructure, and strengthening digital capabilities across government.

Governments today face challenges such as AI, demographic change, climate risks, and geopolitical uncertainty that are evolving faster than conventional policy cycles. We therefore started with a simple question: How can we make futures thinking a practical capability of government, rather than something limited to specialists or one-off initiatives?

Through our collaboration with OECD/OPSI, research and interviews with governments around the world, and interviews with senior executives across the Digital Agency, we explored both how other governments are developing strategic foresight capabilities and what prevents longer-term thinking from taking root inside government.

The presentation will focus particularly on the implementation journey: how we navigated annual planning and budgeting cycles, organizational silos, frequent personnel rotations, unclear ownership of new capabilities, and other realities of large bureaucracies.

Rather than creating a separate innovation initiative, we worked to embed foresight into existing government systems and practices. This ultimately led to strategic foresight being incorporated into a cross-government digital capability development and training program for public servants across Japan’s central government ministries and agencies.

This is therefore not only a story about foresight. It is a broader case study about how governments can build new capabilities within institutions that are fundamentally designed for stability.