This is the second part of a two-part article series where I discuss three topics:

1. Defining, measuring and developing a strategic foresight capability
2. Continuous strategic foresight: what & how
3. Integrating continuous strategic foresight into continuous strategizing, i.e. strategic conversations and management

I had the privilege of presenting these ideas to a to a large audience of interested executives and experts at Capful’s breakfast seminar in Helsinki on the 8^th of March 2023.

Continuous strategic foresight: what & how

Adopting strategic foresight as a continuous activity is an increasingly popular issue. Like when eating the metaphorical elephant, it is better to start with small bites. If the following, I will focus on a specific application area: developing the means to do strategic foresight for continuous strategic decision-making. Here, you apply the capability I talked about in my previous article.

Methods for continuous foresight are manifold, but the two main ways to generate futures knowledge are horizon scanning and environment monitoring. To many, monitoring and scanning sound like two sides of the same coin, but they have a distinct and meaningful differences. Monitoring takes the inside-out perspective to foresight: it is based on the strategic assumptions you’ve made about the future(s) of your environment that make or break your strategy. The idea is to monitor whether these assumptions are becoming true or not, and the drivers impacting their fate. In monitoring, the foresight work is scoped, whereas in horizon scanning, the purpose is much more about exploration and outside-in thinking – discovering and analyzing weak signals and emerging trends that might impact your organization’s performance. High-quality strategic foresight applies both methods.    

Along with methods, continuous foresight requires a clear enough scope to ensure it does not become too open-ended. In addition, you need a process or a defined way of working with timed deliverables, assigned resources and roles with tasks and systems and tools to facilitate collaborative data gathering, analysis and results dissemination. There might be industry-specific data sources that provide information of sufficient depth, but foresighters increasingly rely on AI, advanced search methods, personal networks and their research – including real and virtual experiences. Ultimately, what is generated are signals, signal collections and initial what-if questions.

Whether the foresight “content” or futures knowledge is generated by a consultant, an in-house researcher, or the top management team themselves, it is useless without proper integration into the strategizing processes and forums in the organization. It is here where sensemaking – understanding the implications of futures knowledge to us – ultimately happens. These “Aha!” moments are notoriously difficult to disseminate since people must have them on their own. Foresight must become a part of strategic decision-making.   

Integrating continuous strategic foresight into continuous strategizing

Continuous strategic decision-making requires vision and facts, including customer or stakeholder feedback, financial performance figures, performance KPI outcomes and so on. Truly integrating strategic foresight with continuous strategizing in your organization is not only about adding one “new” type of information into your decision-making. While foresight can be defined as a type of knowledge about the potential futures of phenomena or whole systems, successfully applying it in decision-making requires fundamental changes in your entire way and structure of management. Without these changes, getting the full – or even necessary – benefits of strategic foresight is impossible. What do you need to reconsider and reconfigure in your management model to take full advantage of strategic foresight?

First, using strategic foresight requires you to adjust the context in which you have strategic conversations and “do” continuous strategizing. By context we mean the vision of the organization, organizational objectives, plans and assumptions about the future of the external environment that affects the success of the organization. The last bit of the context is too often not made explicit: the assumptions live in the minds of a select few and might not be scrutinized but only taken as granted or as obvious “truths”. Strategic foresight necessitates making the assumptions explicit and shared in the organization, because they form a major part of the foundation for successful continuous foresight. As I discussed earlier, monitoring the assumptions we have and how they become real or not is a fundamental part of strategic foresight.   

Second, benefiting from strategic foresight requires rethinking what you need to do and achieve in strategizing. In other words, you have to reconfigure how you have strategic conversations in the organization. The party responsible for strategizing, often a CEO or a director, must prepare and set an agenda for shared sensemaking, where foresight is discussed and conclusions about foresight are made. The party must have futures thinking capabilities and be able to facilitate the shared foresighting, sensemaking and options assessment.

Third and final, the management structures and processes must be addressed to take full advantage of strategic foresight. Integrating foresighting as an activity and the results of foresight from other parties to strategic conversations often lead to changes in existing strategizing forums, i.e., their timing, length, agenda and participants. The organization’s management model – when and where critical decisions are made throughout the year – might need to be adjusted, in addition to different processes and interfaces where strategic decisions are turned into action.

In summary, treating foresight as just one type of information to be fed into strategic conversations undercuts its total value to strategic management.

Let’s connect if you want to talk more

This is the first part of a two-part article series where I discuss three topics:

1. Defining, measuring and developing a strategic foresight capability
2. Continuous strategic foresight: what & how
3. Integrating continuous strategic foresight into continuous strategizing, i.e., strategic conversations and management

I had the privilege of presenting these ideas to a large audience of interested executives and experts at Capful’s breakfast seminar in Helsinki on the 8th of March, 2023.

As operating environments face more and more radical uncertainties, organizations across industries and sectors are looking for ways to cope and flourish. A key instrument is building their foresight capabilities. But what exactly constitutes a foresight capability, and what should one consider when developing it? Given our experience, we at Capful can provide helpful insights to these questions.

What do you need to develop your strategic foresight capability?

The basis of any strategic foresight practices, processes or functions in organizations is a clear understanding of the organizational needs, objectives and desired outcomes for strategic foresight. Consider the use cases for foresight that are critical to your organization’s short, mid- and long-term performance. What decisions or processes require regular support by foresight?

Answering the above questions can lead to utopian dreams about where and how foresight should be utilized, which is good – being ambitious is only useful here. However, temper your plans with realistic expectations about how well your organization can utilize the results of strategic foresight currently and in the near term. Eat the foresight elephant one bite at a time.

With an understanding of what is expected from strategic foresight, it is time to build the model for it. The model comprises five major areas:

• Chosen scope and focus, themes and questions in consideration: i.e., what topics are you exploring
• The available and assigned know-how, networks, resources and responsibilities for performing strategic foresight
• Methods, tools, analytics and data sources for strategic foresight
• Way of organizing, processes and measurement of strategic foresight
• Interfaces and integration with the rest of the organization and its other processes

If you already have a working model, fixed to support one or few use-cases in your organization, you need to assess the effectiveness and ability to create value of strategic foresight. How suitable and adequate are the elements of the model in relation to the desired outcomes and the needs and objectives of the organization? How does the model work and perform? Consider also does foresight decrease uncertainty among your stakeholders. Does it trigger strategic decision-making, and does it influence and support foresight-led action?

We have developed more detailed and rigorous assessment methods for pinpointing development needs for organizations’ strategic foresight capabilities, but examinations already at this level can uncover key insights. Gaps in performance should then be used – along with exciting possibilities in model development and changing needs from the organization – to drive the creation of your desired state for strategic foresight capability. Ultimately, this view provides you with a living plan for further developing your foresight capability.

However, a capability is nothing without application. How, then to build processes for continuous foresight and integrate it with continuous strategizing? I will discuss this in the second part of the article – coming soon.

Let’s connect if you want to talk more

This short blog text is NOT about how we could have anticipated ”the great resignation”. Foresight could have opened the eyes to the possibility of this fundamental change in work life. But now that we have realized that employees have other ways of appreciating things than the generations mostly in charge in the organizations, we must find ways to cope with the challenges and keep talent. We propose that a proper foresight process that includes and empowers people is crucial to avoid ”the great resignation”.

Originally leaders made the voyage into the future. They perceived what the organization could be in the future, defined strategy, etc. Then they returned to here and now to inform the organization of the journey ahead. But this is a less helpful way. It is more beneficial to engage a significant part of the organization in exploring future possibilities, formulating ideas of how to be successful, and thus sharing the understanding of the future endeavour. Let us highlight some aspects of such an approach.

Millennials have already, and generation Z is starting to form the basis for organizational success. We know that their views of the role of work in life differ from those of the generations that now have the bulk of leadership positions. From a focus on work, we shifted towards balancing work and private life, and now we are moving to a situation where life comes first and then one looks at how work can contribute to life. Meaningfulness of our work is increasingly important among many employees, especially in developed economies. Work must contribute to your life. Otherwise, you allocate your time to other opportunities. Meaning emerges when you are involved in the conversation about where and how to navigate future uncharted waters. This calls on leadership to both design and engage people in the processes. Proper foresight processes create an understanding of the dynamics in the contextual environment. They highlight opportunities and risks, put strategy formulation and chosen strategies into context. In addition, they enable identification of needs to adjust strategy, and form the basis for an ongoing strategic conversation and certify that the brand is built from inside the organization. A good design enables people to participate in the conversation and enhances motivation. It does neither outsource managerial responsibilities nor minimize the role of leadership [2].

Organizational success can be attributed to the fit, and consonance, between the elements forming its business idea; i.e. the external environment, the offering and internal factors. The fit forms the dominating ideas of the organization [3]. In line with the evolution of the contextual environment, the organization should renew its set of dominating ideas. Unfortunately, the existing dominating ideas stick very hard with management, partly because management is enacting current strategy. A proper foresight process might help overcome this, and it especially empowers the organization to raise critical voices without criticizing management. The process should, if appropriately designed, be the natural forum for highlighting signals of emerging changes in the context and the potential impact on the organization. The foresight process should be the arena for ”making disagreement an asset”. To quote Richard Norman (2001) ”no other process in an organization is more fundamental in the long term than this renewal of the dominating ideas, the reappreciation of an organization’s identity and way of manifesting it, in the face of environmental change”. Foresight fuels this process. The organization will own the outcome as long as it has been empowered by leadership and good process design to participate in the strategic conversation. By feeling that one shares the dominating ideas of the organization, one is probably less likely to be part of the great resignation.

You will also perceive the meaningfulness of your work if the organization is pursuing meaningful goals. The organization’s ESG agenda is important for many employees. They want their organization to do good, otherwise, they depart. Does foresight have anything to do with this? Yes indeed.

Traditionally, the scenario praxis saw changes coming from the contextual environment, and there was little you could do than to adapt. This limited the sphere for strategic options. Fortunately, our mental repertoire is not so limited anymore. Think e.g. about WBCSD’s normative scenarios to ensure that 9 billion people can live within planetary boundaries, Adam Kahane’s work with transformative scenarios to embrace collective action, or the ideas of Market Shaping by Nenonen & Storbacka [4]. Actors can shape the future. In an organization, creative interpretation of what could be possible can reframe the thinking. By traveling into the future, one can reperceive what the organization can do and draw a new map that will change the landscape, using Norman’s subtitle (2001). Scenarios are perfect tools for drawing new maps for landscapes that do not exist yet. Adopting this view in foresight and strategy work will engage individuals who want to create a better tomorrow for the world, the organization, and themself. Empowered by a well-designed and inclusive foresight process, the ties to the organization get stronger.

Blessed are the leaders who know that they do not know. They are geared towards calling on the power of the organization and mastering the art of strategic conversation. This is even more important when the organization’s operational environment is confronted with significant changes, such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Leadership is well advised to foster organizational capabilities to explore future possibilities for value creation. Engaging the organization in the journey into plausible futures and back requires good process design and leadership that empowers people. Getting this right lays a good foundation for strategies that create value for all stakeholders, including society, customers and colleagues. Leaders that enable the organization to connect the future with the present they understand that leadership is an art. You are a leader as long as those you lead give you the privilege to lead them. Having a common understanding of what the future might bring at you is key. Future oriented leadership, supported by scenarios from proper foresight processes, empowers the organization to join the journey into a meaningful future. The endeavour minimizes the risk of resignation and keeps the best talent onboard.

This note is an invitation to continue the discussion. We humbly accept that there is more to learn. Happy to do that together – let’s connect.

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[1] Sincere thanks to my colleagues Risto Lätti and Nando Malmelin for constructive comments on an earlier version of this text

[2] I’m thankful to all my former colleagues at Sifo – Research International Sweden (now Kantar Sweden) for our co-creation of understanding of organizational development, manifested in the ”Management of Intangible Assets” concept.

[3] For an in-depth discussion, see e.g., Norman (1975) Management for Growth, or Norman (2001) Reframing Business – when the Map Changes the Landscape.

[4] https://www.wbcsd.org/Overview/About-us/Vision-2050-Time-to-Transform/Resources/Time-to-Transform;  Kahane (2012): Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future or Kahane (2021): Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together;  Nenonen & Storbacka (2018): SMASH: Using Market Shaping to Design New Strategies for Innovation, Value Creation, and Growth.