Category: Technical

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.

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.

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.

Watch a short clip of a talk that Kedge Principal Yvette Montero Salvatico gave in 2016. Yvette discusses intentionally and purposefully creating aspirational futures, and how Strategic Foresight methods and tools facilitate the ability to pull yourself to the future.

“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.” Imagine, if you will, a dark and stormy night. Terror crackles or rips, or snaps through the streets like a live wire. Panicked voices cry from every corner. Newscasters with shaky voices urge the public to remain calm, to no avail. Then out of the darkness, with flashing eyes and gnashing…

Developing and executing business strategy, products and innovative ideas in our current environment demands new approaches and mindsets. Linear methods that rely solely on the extrapolation of historical results are completely ineffective as technological advancements, economic uncertainty, and increased systematic risk become the new normal. To effectively drive understanding, performance, and execution of strategic initiatives, organizations must think and act in “simultaneous multiples” – pressure-testing their strategies in diverse operating environments. 

Mashups result from the creative blend of two or more songs, overlaying lyrics from one hit onto the instrumental beats of another.

As part of a regional 3-year plan to reframe economic development through the lens of broad-based prosperity, the Orlando region has leveraged foresight to develop a series of strategic transformations.  One such initiative has been called “Autonomous Connection” and leverages the growing technology of autonomous transportation as a means to create community-wide access and inclusion to services, education, healthcare, jobs, tourism, cultural diversity, and a broader sense of place and belonging. As the Orlando region increases the use of autonomous…

Change management efforts often fail because they focus on the issues as they bubble up to the surface. The result is Band-Aid solutions that fail to address the underlying culture and guiding narratives of an organization. To achieve long-lasting change, we must explore what is beneath the obvious to understand why this issue exists in the first place. Foresight uncovers the dynamics of our present story while also creating pathways to our preferred outcomes. We all have a natural filter…