Four Futures for Occupational Safety and Health

Abstract

Rapid changes to the nature of work have challenged the capacity of existing occupational safety and health (OSH) systems to ensure safe and productive workplaces. An effective response will require an expanded focus that includes new tools for anticipating and preparing for an uncertain future. Researchers at the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) have adopted the practice of strategic foresight to structure inquiry into how the future will impact OSH. Rooted in futures studies and strategic management, foresight creates well-researched and informed future scenarios that help organizations better prepare for potential challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. This paper summarizes the inaugural NIOSH strategic foresight project, which sought to promote institutional capacity in applied foresight while exploring the future of OSH research and practice activities. With multidisciplinary teams of subject matter experts at NIOSH, we undertook extensive exploration and information synthesis to inform the development of four alternative future scenarios for OSH. We describe the methods we developed to craft these futures and discuss their implications for OSH, including strategic responses that can serve as the basis for an action-oriented roadmap toward a preferred future.

Keywords: alternative futures; data security; drivers of change; mental health; occupational safety and health; partnerships; scenarios; strategic foresight; virtual work.

Figure 1

Foresight Framework for OSH, first published in Streit et al. (2021) [13]. While the framework is presented as a sequential model, the process is not entirely linear. The end of each stage should consider work completed in previous stages to determine if additional work is needed before moving on to the next stage. During each stage of the current project, we critically reviewed the outputs from the previous stages to determine if additional work was needed before proceeding, creating a sequence much like a feedback loop in a logic model. Our application of this approach, described in detail throughout the rest of the paper, provided a solid foundation for moving through the full strategic foresight process.

Figure 2

Doman map for the Future of OSH.

Figure 3

Visual representation of Three-Horizon Foresight [28], first published in Streit et al. (2021) [13].

Figure 4

Cross-impact matrix for drivers of change.

Figure 5

Authors’ overview of four archetypes, informed by guidance materials from Hines & Bishop (2015) [26], Dator (1979, 2009) [151,152], IFTF (2021) [153].