Strategic Foresight (3 Days)
Our 3-day Strategic Foresight course will introduce you to a rigorous portfolio of tools to help analyse issues, events and trends of concern. We'll show you how to establish their provenance, plot their trajectory and anticipate their impacts. Armed with these insights we'll help you define the strategies needed to mitigate the risks and capitalise on the opportunities you foresee.
Course Outline
Introduction to Strategic Foresight
Introduction to Foresight
- A short history of foresight
- Core concepts and definitions
- Foresight as an analytic discipline
- Foresight as perception measurement
- Sensing the future: how and why
- The predicament and paradox of foresight
Project Scoping
- Defining the scope of your foresight project
- Defining your audience
- Defining your time horizon
- Building the scenario team
- Mahaffie's Foresight Initiation Framework
Issue, Event and Trend Scanning
- Introduction to Horizon Scanning
- Working with PESTLE and its variants
- Issue and event scanning frameworks
- Building custom scanning frameworks
- Clarifying macro, messo and micro trends
- Prioritising your scanning results
Analysing Your Scanning Efforts
- Mapping trend relationships
- Trend Stage Analysis
- Circles of control, influence and concern
Issue / Event / Trend Analysis
Mapping Drivers
- Introduction to causal analysis
- The Five Why's Framework
- Working with Diagnostic Trees
- Generating Causal Maps
Conducting Situational Assessments
- Analysing shapers
- Analysing inhibitors
- Analysing disruptors
- Analysing accelerators
- Analysing winners and losers
- Framework conditions
Anticipating Impacts
- Layered impact analysis
- Temporal impact analysis
- N-order effects analysis
- Trend on trend analysis
- Risk and opportunity analysis
- Anticipating countertrends
- Anticipating impacts with the Futures Cone
- Working with words of estimative probability
- Reducing prediction errors
From Strategic Foresight to Strategic Action
Action Planning
- From insights to implications
- From implications to actions
- Action planning frameworks
- Minimum Viable Response (MVR) planning
- The Powers of Ten model
- The GRASP model
- The Adaptive Response model
- Planning for requisite variety
Course Details
WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?
This course is intended for anyone working in an analytical role. This includes intelligence analysts, risk analysts, early warning practitioners and strategic analysts and planners.
HOW YOU BENEFIT
On completion of this course you will have the ability to:
- Understand the utility of strategic foresight
- Apply a range of scanning frameworks to support situational awareness
- Map the drivers and shapers of a given issue, event or trend
- Generate and evaluate predictive judgements
- Anticipate risks and opportunities
- Define and implement suitable response plans
WHAT YOU RECEIVE
- A certificate of course completion
- A full set of course slides
- Templates to support the application of the techniques taught
- Six months of post-course support
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
Please observe the following technical requirements:
- You will need a Windows or Mac laptop (tablet computers are not recommended)
- Install Google Chrome
- Install Microsoft Office
- Set up a Google account to facilitate the use of online tools
Additional software requirements will be sent prior to the start of the course.
Course Prerequisites
We recommend that participants first complete our Intelligence Analysis: Foundations course before undertaking this program. This is to ensure they understand our approach to critical, creative and conceptual reasoning.
