Often, in workshop settings, it is useful to begin with a light exercise that stimulates participants’ interactive participation, encourages them to think outside of their ordinary lines of thinking, and which therefore helps prep them for the events to follow.
This is perhaps especially true for participatory foresight workshops with participants not trained in or familiar with foresight are tasked with imagining futures and supplying information and creative solutions beyond their ordinary and traditional expertise. This is not easy, and participants often feel a little uncomfortable about this, at least at first. Asking a simple question that the participant is able to relate to, while simultaneously taking them outside their traditional modes of thinking, is often an effective way of starting to build the trust and comfortability that a good outcome of the workshop requires. 

For this reason, as part of Eye of Europe we have built a set of tried and tested Foresight Starter Prompts that organizers can use in workshop settings. These prompts provide questions that organizers can used to initiate workshop conversation and get the workshop off to a good start. 

By making this standard set of Foresight Starter Prompts available, we want to lower the barrier for organizing workshops and lower the barrier for inviting new groups of people into the workshops.

The prompt really is a simple question aimed at stimulating thinking, discussion, and participation. Not all questions are explicitly related to the future or to foresight and futures thinking, but as you can see in the material, they all have their use for stimulating this.

New and emerging plant pests can undermine EU food security and farm/forestry incomes through yield losses, trade disruption and costly control measures, while also causing major environmental impacts through biodiversity loss, landscape change and increased pressure to use pesticides.  

Using a comprehensive foresight methodology, this study examines how global trade and tourism, climate change and agricultural systems contribute to the introduction and spread of new and emerging plant pests, assesses current and future pest risks, as well as scientific and technological options for their prevention, detection, and management, and reviews existing EU mechanisms.  

The study develops four scenarios up to 2050 to explore how key uncertainties may shape pest risks and system responses. Based on these insights, it identifies policy options to strengthen prevention, preparedness, and response capacities, supporting future EU policymaking.

This foresight study was conducted by Technopolis Group with experts from the Julius Kühn-Institute for the European Parliament's Panel for the Future of Science and Technology and commissioned by Scientific Foresight Unit (STOA) of the European Parliamentary Research Service. 

The report is published on the website of the European Parliament: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_STU(2026)788146.