Strategic Foresight

A system has a purpose, even if it is changing and emerging or you can’t see what it is (or it isn’t a system)

You can learn to extend your ability to think into the future and this is very important if you want to develop your Strategic Foresight muscles further.

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 differences between simple problems and wicked problems affect the way you deal with them, so it is very important to understand (and agree) how to talk about and work with these problems. This means challenging every assumption you have that an obstacle, problem or mess is made up of a simple or tame problem – it is very likely that it is

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.

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

Patterns are what you might notice if you look at all the events together.