Strategic Foresight

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

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.

For, as futurist author William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”19

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.

A system is any group of interacting, interrelated or inter-dependent parts that form a complex and unified whole which has a specific purpose. Interdependency of parts put together for a purpose is key here

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.

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.

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.

When you do all the hard work to understand what’s going on and you don’t share it—effectively—you negate your role.