Strategic Foresight

Mapping is a tool to capture what happens during this experimentation and enabling you to respond to the feedback as it happens.

Questions can open the mind to possibility; enquiry is the source of creativity and innovation.

Strategic Foresight starts with you, personally. You make the choice of how you want to engage with the future. Do you want to let it happen to you? Or would you prefer to do some work to understand what may happen, figure out what you can influence and then put that into action?

The order in which the parts are assembled or arranged affects the system’s performance (if parts aren’t connected properly to the motherboard, the system won’t work)

Strategic Foresight is open to alternative futures, that is, you work with several futures (certainly more than one!) because you know that you can’t predict the future and it most certainly won’t be an extrapolation from the past. It can evolve in different directions and, using Strategic Foresight, you can determine which are possible, which are

In the complex context the leader probes first, then makes sense and finally responds. In the chaotic context, the leader acts first, then makes sense of how that worked and then responds.

When you use Strategic Foresight you are turning the tables by looking to the future, identifying what is possible and, most importantly, what you can influence, which puts you in a position of ability (you are ABLE to do something about a given situation).

Snowden differentiates between complex contexts where cause and effect are difficult to see and perhaps can only be seen in retrospect and chaotic contexts where cause and effect are constantly shifting.

Once you are clear on how you got to where you are and what you have learned from that, you can begin to look at what is possible and start to explore how your organisation got to its present situation, adapting the exercise so that you can learn from its history. Only then will you ready for the next steps.