Strategic Foresight

systemic structures are what cause the patterns and events you notice; it is the way the system is organised and put together.

It’s a discovery process; you are looking to find out what is out there, what could potentially occur.

In terms of Strategic Foresight, messes are obstacles in your path to a preferred future – the “what could stop you” influencing not just the future that you want to get to, but also how you get there.

The behaviour of a mess depends more on how the different parts/problems within it interact than on how they act independently of one another. This means that you can’t really solve a mess, but you can manage it.

an explorer of the unknown and as yet unseen.

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

The reason that you develop a strategy is to make sure that you/your business remains continuously relevant to the unfolding future so that you can flourish and endure not just today but also tomorrow. You need to navigate the ship of yourself (or your organisation) over time and into the future as that future unfolds and becomes the present.

Filling in the map as we go – sharing collective knowledge where none of us is sure what we know – will help build a bridge to the future – or even to a new and deeper understanding of the present. It will help you to recognise, map and navigate around the obstacles you find. So, you can prepare to just tweak the steering a bit or to change directi

The future is totally unknown – so some preparation is needed before you start the journey. For this journey to potential futures (as with most journeys to new places you don’t know yet), you need to expect the unexpected – which can be difficult.