So by calling foresight the “front end of strategy”, you can help your audience realize that if they don’t do anything consciously before they jump into their strategy work, and most teams don’t, they are presently missing an entire set of practices, developed over the last sixty years by foresight practitioners, that promise to greatly improve their strategic outcomes. Strategic foresight is a large set of thinking, discussion, and practices we can do as inputs to strategy, that will reliably make make strategy(the last foresight skill) both more future-aware and future-resilient. Most organizations don’t have any incentives, or culture to elicit any kind of thinking, discussion, or process prior to doing strategy and planning. Houston Strategic Foresight MS, is that “foresight is anything we do prior to strategic planning.” This isn’t a perfect definition, as strategy is also a critical part of foresight, but it is a great introduction to the need for well designed and rewarded foresight practice. One great elevator-pitch definition of foresight, taught to me by Peter Bishop, past director of the U. We’ve labeled the practices with four words, Learning, Anticipation, Innovation, and Strategy, that are particularly useful to organizations. When strategy is subject to cognitively, skill, and experience-diverse critique, this order is also a self-improving cycle.
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That gives us four key practices, placed here into a particularly effective order. We can also group defensive thinking ( Preventable futures) and advantage thinking ( Preferred futures) as the two most fundamental types of strategy. We can group the first two of these thinking types, the Past and Present, as preparation for future thinking.
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When we use these consciously, and ask how to balance them against each other for the problem at hand, we have the potential to generate the best strategy we can. The some of these thinking types can be grouped together, giving us Four Foresight Skills. The combination of successful foresightand successful action skillswill be called adaptive foresight in this Guide.Īs we’ll now see, there are six thinking types that all professionals use to generate strategic foresight. It won’t actually make an entity adaptive unless it is also coupled to successful action. We can define strategic foresight as future thinking that has the potential (the capacity) to make an entity (individual, team, organization, etc.) more adaptive, or successful.
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This is an exciting time for foresight practice, as our leading professional organizations are all searching for new and more inclusive definitions of our field. Our field must recognize all the parts of itself as it grows up, so we can better share and compare our models and methods, and do better collaborative work on foresight problems. One key to professionalizing the foresight field is finding better definitions of what strategic foresight work actually is, and who engages in it. The Six Ps of Strategic Foresight – Using the Core Thinking Types Well