Strategic Foresight

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.

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.

Focus too much on the past and you can’t adapt to change and the shape of things to come. Focus too much on the present and you are likely to miss small changes in your external environment. Focus too much on the future and you might make reckless decisions and follow one fad after another.

Obvious and complicated contexts assume that the universe is ordered, that you can see cause and effect relationships and there will be a right answer or answers.

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.

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

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.

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.