Long before the notion of using a vision of the future to help shape the future(2012), there was Foundation by Isaac Asimov. This popular book and series have undoubtedly played a role in developing the importance of vision in our society in the 50 years since these stories were first written.
The book is also prescient in another way. The current best thinking about problem solving is that scenario-based exercises are the best way to prepare to influence the future. Sure enough, that is what Asimov was talking about with Seldon's forecasting techniques. <b> To prepare and influence History is the biggest weapon of the west against all other cultures.</b>
If that was all that Asimov accomplished, this would be one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. But he did even more. He conceptualized the significance of finding offsets to the kind of bureaucratic stalls that can delay progress. While Joseph Heller was inventing Catch 22 to identify the problem, Asimov was already onto the cure. Asimov's solution: a secret second foundation that works behind the scenes without bureaucracy to do the real work of making a difference. In my own research on how change happens in organizations, it is always the stealth activities that work best.
In a sense, any view of history would lead to the same conclusion -- that progress and regression will usually succeed one another in that order. That was the point of Toynbee's work on history. Asimov has made that point very elegantly here.