Articles

Long before the current craze around unconscious bias modeling, foresight professionals were using futures thinking as a critical element in breaking through assumptions and biases to create organizational, cultural, and workforce development and change.

In order to understand why I have such a strong passion for foresight, it’s helpful to get a glimpse into my background. For 15 years, I worked internationally in the field of Marketing, Innovation and Business Strategy across different FMCG, Finance and Entertainment blue-chip companies (AB InBev, Societe Generale, Disney), as well as successfully growing start-ups. Most recently, I held a Consumer Strategy role at The Walt Disney Company. Working in a highly analytic strategy job yet experiencing a passion…

In an attempt to define the exponential change that is reframing our traditional operating systems and social structures, sociologist and futurist Ziauddin Sardar coined the phrase “Postnormal Times.”

An excerpt from The Guide to Natural® Foresight Framework: The following case study showcases the value, in terms of practical impact and tangible outcomes, that foresight drives in strategy. Situation A North American Fortune 500 retail chain was launching its first effort to integrate talent management strategies across the enterprise. A team of more than 50 executives was tasked to create a holistic approach to development, recruitment, retention, and compensation. In the process, they quickly realized they also needed a…

While commonly used in business planning and development efforts, Strategic Foresight differs from strategic planning, which relies largely on spreadsheet based models to extrapolate historical performance into a linear future plan.

The Natural Foresight® Framework is presented in four technical facets: Discover, Explore, Map, and Create. Discover: We must look past our present-day models and ideas in order to recognize disruptors on the horizon of business and society.

Strategic Foresight is a decades-old discipline that allows us to create functional views of alternative futures and possibilities.

To drive value in an ever-changing world of increasing chaos, complexity and contradictions, we must adopt new ways of thinking that will guide our actions for breakthroughs. The Natural Foresight® framework behavioral competencies include three mindsets that are necessary to harness and leverage this world of complexity: sensing, meshing, and transformation.

The Natural Foresight® Framework mirrors complex systems and, ultimately, the model of the nested panarchy. This excerpt from The Guide to the Natural Foresight Framework explains the theories supporting the Natural Foresight® Framework. It discusses how the framework not only helps us to leverage complexity as a foundational principle for robust foresight, but it also provides a practical and intuitive approach to futures literacy.

The learning environment cultivated inside of an organization either enables or deters leaders from growing and transforming their capabilities. We came across Sahana Chattopadhyay’s Medium article (published July 31st), “Six Enablers of Emergent Learning” which beautifully speaks to organizational culture’s influence on leadership inclusive of underlying principles that are critical to foresight.