Foresight is not about predicting the future. Instead foresight is about imagining many different futures: Positive futures, negative futures, weird futures, and amazing futures. By imagining all of these possible futures, we can begin to talk about which of these futures we want to live and work in - and then take practical steps today to make those futures more likely.
- Institute for the Future (IFTF)
Thinking the Unthinkable
"Thinking the Unthinkable" is a 20 hours Foresight Workshop spread across five interventions of 4 hours duration each
Develop cognitive flexibility, prepare your mind by defining the future you care about, and lay the groundwork for creative, interpretive, foresights.
Key takeaways
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Build a clear sense of different attitudes and assumptions about the future
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Define a timeline looking at least twice as far back as your are looking forward, with a sense of change cycle and builds
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Establish a clear and compelling futures question.
Practice creative thinking that encompasses future possibilities and systematic analysis of patterns that affect change. Use tools that help us sense change and communicate vision.
Key takeaways
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Identify new possibilities within patterns of unrelated signals
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Develop alternative scenarios describing a range of possibilities
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Articulate personas of future stakeholders and stories about how the future affects them.
Translate foresight into implications and choices we need to make today. Insights points towards opportunities we can begin to pursue today and future threats we need to avoid.
Key takeaways
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Develop strategies to scale the second curve at the right pace
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Create a map of impacts and intersections between future change and present day structures
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Identify threats and opportunities present within alternative scenarios
Action tools help visualize, organize, prioritize next steps, identify potential networks of change and brainstorm new experiments to refine your strategic efforts.
Key takeaways
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Clear understanding and articulation of your emotional reaction, embedded assumptions, and biases about a particular future
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Identify small scale efforts that build momentum and help you refine your path
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Build a map of potential collaborators, accelerators and skeptics.
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Identify and enumerate critical elements needed to build towards your preferred future
Use intuition to recognize patterns and other subtle cues that enable us to develop appropriate decision making skills necessary for developing foresight
Key takeaways
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Apply methods to recognize, build and strengthen the intuitive decision making skills
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Use intuition in business situations to distinguish key signals from background noise.
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Apply intuition as a decision making tool to build foresight