Overview

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Today, organizations find themselves dealing with an increasing amount of uncertainty. They are often ill-equipped at responding to disruptive change and find themselves blindsided by ‘unexpected’ landslides in their ecosystems. In order to hold their ground, they need to upgrade their capabilities, become more agile in adapting to change and drive firm-level, society-level and industry-level change proactively. This course introduces you to strategic foresight, its main methods and tools and their application in public and private organisations. Foresight allows organisations to get ahead of the curve, pre-emptively catch trends, define more effective and robust policies and drive positive futures. You will also learn how foresight is an inclusive way of preparing for the future, how to involve a wide set of stakeholders, overcome silo thinking and leverage collective intelligence to advance the status quo. The course is built on over 15 years of benchmarking among leading organisations and leverages on the collective experience of three lecturers, who introduced foresight, strategy, innovation and design thinking to public organisation and in leading private sector companies. After completing this course, you will understand the need for strategic foresight, as well as how and where it is used, which benefits it yields and why leading organisations systematically invest in staying on top of the future.

Syllabus

Introduction, Scanning for signals and Developing drivers of change

In this first module of the strategic foresight course we will introduce you to the language and basic principles of foresight . You will learn how to convert signals into drivers of change, and how to interpret drivers of change to succeed in the face of uncertainty in your business and in your personal career.

Why scenario thinking is key to prepare for uncertain futures

This week, in module 2, we will introduce you to scenarios, which are built from the drivers you learned about in the previous module. In Module 1, you identified signals of how the future might be different and learned how to separate signal from noise to identify drivers of change. Scenarios help you create multiple plausible futures and catch them in stories and images. These stories inform long term decision making. Let's unleash our creativity and explore how those drivers combine in non-linear and complex ways to create narratives and scenarios for very different futures.

Developing scenarios and working with stakeholders

In this module you will learn how to develop -and use- scenarios as a way to make futures tangible. As mentioned, we need to limit the amount of scenarios to make our foresight project manageable. By putting two drivers, selected through the approach from previous chapter in a scenario cross, we can create a spectrum of four plausible futures as a basis for strategic conversations. We will demonstrate and test with you how scenario narratives can become a catalyst for impactful strategies.

Developing future-oriented and unique strategies

Having learned how to craft compelling narratives of the future, you will now turn to strategize based on these future scenarios. You will come up with strategies that are different from your current one and different to the status quo. These are known as distant strategies. They form part of a portfolio of actions to help us balance performance and robustness. We will look at how scenarios can help you determine your Massive Transformation Purpose, a “why” to commit to. This helps you look at “what” actions we can take and “how” you will achieve them. The strategy playbox will provide you with a mechanism to systematically explore what is possible within current constraints.

Building organisational foresight capabilities

In the two previous modules we focused on the practice of foresight. We were introduced to the Scenario Sprint method and learnt how scenarios help us to co-create compelling narratives that support strategy and decision making. This week, you will learn how to make foresight part of your everyday life, as an individual or in an organization. Module five will present you with materials and arguments to support the case for investing in foresight, and will provide you with the necessary information to scale the competency to identify, interpret and act on signals of change.