Strategic Foresight

an explorer of the unknown and as yet unseen.

Rather, it is what is termed a wicked problem, where no definition can be agreed between stakeholders and which cannot be completely ‘solved’.

This is where Strategic Foresight comes into its own. It builds on (and around) the more structured frameworks to help you to discover, assess and map the uncertainties that are part of your system.

Systems try to maintain equilibrium through feedback (which in the case of a PC usually means it tells you to reboot).

When you don’t know the purpose of a system it is very hard to understand its behaviour and the impact of actions on the system.

Recognising systems allows you to look for patterns in their interactions.

Systems thinking is a discipline, and it has its own vocabulary and maps. It is one of several frameworks that have been developed to help people work effectively with systems, understanding the implications of interdependent parts and enabling them to make robust decisions in uncertain, emerging and unclear space.

Messes are exacerbated by complexity. Complexity tends to encourage fragmented thinking (which isn’t a good thing if you want to manage a mess) by making it more difficult to get to a shared, agreed understanding of a mess.

If Strategic Foresight is to be effective and successful, you must increase your self-awareness, for which you need to reflect and gain insight on how you got to where you are.