Category: Strategy

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.

By: Joana Lenkova During the Warring States period (475-221 BC) in Chinese history characterized by perpetual wars between divided states, strategists offered advice on how to conduct war, receiving payment for their services. These first strategy consultants were a group of traveling philosophers inclusive of people such as Confucius and Sun Tzu. Today in strategy, we often use the metaphor of war quoting Sun Tzu. However, “The Art of War” was written 2500 years ago and while the statements might…

Author’s Note: (In the process of writing this piece on the future of transportation, I decided to focus on the effect that new personal transportation and disruptive mobility technology choices will have on strategies for transportation resilience.) Predictions about the transportation industry are rife with extremes and contradictions. Can autonomous vehicles make up the vast majority of more last-mile deliveries but also bring an end to congested streets? People look forward to traveling in their personal drones, yet only 37%…

In 2017, Yvette Montero Salvatico, Co-Founder of The Futures School, conducted a webinar for the Institute for Competitive Intelligence on, “Strategic Foresight – How to Achieve a Forward Looking Perspective.” In this presentation, Yvette explained how a foresight mindset and toolkit propels us from competitive intelligence toward futures intelligence.

Last month, Kedge had the honor of partnering with branding firm, Picnic, to host The Future of Brands event in Madrid, Spain. Marketing professionals, brand executives and creatives from across multiple industries joined us for two days of thought-provoking foresight imagining the future worlds that brands will need to prepare for. The topic is timely as most organizations we partner with share that maintaining relevancy is leadership’s top concern.

In 2018 Central Florida launched an ambitious plan to reconceptualize economic development through participatory foresight. Kedge had the privilege of partnering with the region’s local economic development organization, The Orlando Economic Partnership (the Partnership), to advance its mission for broad-based prosperity using foresight. The project launched with an immersion phase (including targeted interviews, a survey and extensive trend research).

We are no stranger to the question, “Do you have a case study about X foresight work you conducted with X organization?” While over the years we’ve had a variety of briefs detailing transformation in strategy, city development, innovation, change, and culture via our foresight toolkit, we did not have a start-to-finish case study in writing. 2019 is the year that changes!

Many business professionals are not aware that the secret to success in today’s fast-paced environment is having a better understanding of the future. However, that’s exactly what former Walt Disney International VP of Human Resources Richard Ramsey learned when being tasked with leading the WDI Global Futures Team for six years.