Blue Dots Partners

As 2020 gets underway, many people will recite the bumper-sticker adage that “hindsight is always 20/20”. Billy Wilder, the accomplished filmmaker, screenwriter, and journalist gets the credit for first expressing that pithy wisdom.

We do need the combination of both hindsight and foresight if we are to drive success, whether in business, personally, politically, or in other endeavors. Hindsight helps us learn from the past to help inform and shape our vision of and plan for the future. Of course, understanding the past is relatively easy compared to developing the foresight skills needed to navigate successfully into and through the future. Predicting what is in front of us has become even more difficult due to the rate of change in technology, communications, business practices, politics, culture, society, and values. The World Future Society calls this new global challenge “hyper-change”.[1] Fortunately, neither prescience nor black magic are required to build a useful level of foresight competence. In recent years, “strategic foresight” has emerged as a technique to anticipate the future as it relates to businesses and organizations.

The concept of strategic foresight “is the ability to create and maintain a high-quality, coherent and functional forward view, and to use the insights arising in useful organizational ways. For example to detect adverse conditions, guide policy, shape strategy, and to explore new markets, products and services. It represents a fusion of futures methods with those of strategic management.”[2]

The application of strategic foresight, also known as corporate foresight, is an organizational, social, and personal practice that allows us to create functional and operational views of alternative futures and possibilities. Through this process we are better prepared to deal with potential threats and are able to capitalize on hidden opportunities.[3] Applied properly, a strategic foresight effort becomes the front-end for the entire strategic planning process.

Academics, futurists, and business authors have developed a variety of specific strategic foresight methodologies. Common themes running through many approaches can be combined into a single useful and more general framework. You might want to consider six key components of a strategic foresight approach that have emerged. Then debate their value and current status in your own business and whether, where, and how to build them into your own planning.

1. The starting point is to build an experience gathering mechanism that creates a reliable, factual, relevant, and deep knowledge base. In constructing this resource, leaders should ensure that the organization broadens its experience view to collect facts beyond the boundaries and narrow frame of reference that may currently define the lens through which the business views itself. The knowledge base must be a living, accurate, and accessible resource that is a clear and consistent priority for the organization.  
   
   
2. Learn from the facts. A useful knowledge base demands that the organization maintain the mechanisms to organize, analyze, and retain the collective fact set. Then, the business learning comes from rigorous analysis of the data. As part of both strategic planning and operational effectiveness, organizations need to mine the knowledge base to understand how past actions and events are likely to influence the future. A few of those analytical components include market data; customer feedback; competitive status and shifts; strategic and tactical successes and failures; SWOT accuracy; forecast variability; market alignments and misalignments; and organizational skills, responsiveness, and effectiveness. Start to incorporate technology intelligence tools such as Artificial Intelligence and Business Intelligence to increase the depth, completeness, efficiency, and power of your team’s analysis.
   
   
3. Develop and challenge assumptions for the business going forward. Leaders should encourage their teams to understand that the past is often neither the only nor best predictor of the future. Charter the team to thoughtful and thorough explorations and development of a complete set of assumptions. Then encourage your teams to challenge the set of assumptions aggressively but in a collegial way. Define the sets of assumptions that will create positive outcomes versus negative impacts and classify each on a scale from possible to probable.
   
   
4. Test and improve the organization’s predictive powers. Predict what will happen to your business in both small and large ways based on the fact base, analysis, learning, and assumptions. Establish a process to track and evaluate the accuracy of near-term and smaller predictions to learn where the organization’s predictive expertise is well-developed and where to revise the thinking, approach, or people to improve predictive precision. Over time, given successes with smaller predictions, the organization will gain legitimate confidence in the bigger, long-term, bet-the-business decisions.  
   
   
5. Innovate in the ways you think about the business and the processes you rely on. Extend the horizon to view potential opportunities and threats through a wider lens. Cast the opportunity net wider and stimulate creative strategies. Create alternatives for the future of the business that are aligned with the predictions and that the company can use to build a preferred future while preventing and mitigating the negative impacts of conditions, trends, and forces around you.
   
   
6. Integrate the learning, experience, assumptions, predictions and alternative actions into the company’s strategic planning process. Ultimately, the strength of that strategic plan to create good outcomes and eliminate bad ones rests on the quality of the strategic foresight process.

It is impossible to completely control our future but the application of strategic foresight skills and processes arms us with the power to better anticipate, prepare for, and capitalize on what lies ahead. With a conscientious approach to foresight as a core element of planning, companies can better align for success, reduce the influence of chance, and drive the company to greater success.

[1] The Art of Foresight: Preparing for a Changing World, The World Future Society in Systems Thinker Vol. 17, 2018.

[2] Richard Slaughter, Futures for the Third Millennium: enabling the forward view.

[3] The Futures School.