Introduction To Foresight Executive Edition

Foresight is one of humanity's superpowers. We all use it every day, well or poorly, in a foresight-action cycle, to anticipate, create, and manage the future. Foresight professionals are anyone tasked to think about probable, possible, preferable, or preventable futures for others, over any time horizon. Foresight is both a set of time-tested practices, and emerging models of adaptiveness and values, rooted in psychology and complex systems research. We owe it to ourselves, our teams, and our civilization to apply the best practices, models, and worldviews in this vital, exciting, and powerful field. The two books of The Foresight Guide, updated periodically by our team at Foresight University, help executives and students become foresight leaders, starting with themselves and their teams. Book 1 (this book), Introduction to Foresight, covers personal, team, and organizational foresight practices, and their great benefits and challenges. Book 2, Big Picture Foresight (Feb 2022), covers key 21st century models, trends, issues, opportunities, problems, and stories of societal and global adaptiveness, in a world of accelerating change and machine intelligence. Each book is available in both an abridged Executive Edition and an expanded Student Edition. The focus of each book is not just strategic foresight, which will make us more effective in our short-term strategy and actions, independent of our goals and values, but adaptive foresight, or the evidence-based goals, values and practices most likely to improve our personal and group adaptiveness, in any environment, over the long term. This Executive Edition is an ideal text for executives and leaders seeking to understand the vital field of foresight, and to apply it better for themselves, their teams, and in their organizations. Organizational foresight emerged in the mid-20th century, and spans twenty specialties in strategic management, yet it is still poorly understood by many executives and leaders. Read and apply this book, and realize your foresight superpowers.

Thinking about the Future distills the expertise of three dozen senior foresight professionals into a set of essential guidelines for carrying out successful strategic foresight. Presented in a highly scannable yet personable style, each guideline includes an explanation and rationale, key steps, a case example, and resources for further study.

"Organizations today are being challenged to make sense of changes in environments that, now more than ever, are described as VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous). They are also being driven to understand how the future will evolve and what impact it will have not only on the organizations themselves, but also on industries and societies. In recent decades a field has emerged to support organizations in addressing these challenges: strategic foresight. This book is a comprehensive introduction to strategic foresight. It presents a history of the field and explains the main principles in thinking about the future. The book describes how organizations can apply strategic foresight, and explains how it relates to other fields such as strategy, innovation and leadership, highlighting the relevance of strategic foresight not only for organizations but also for individuals, particularly managers and leaders. Grounded in the theoretical foundations of strategic foresight, the book reflects the latest academic research and explores practical applications in different contexts. It draws on more than two decades of experience that the author has in the field as a researcher, a consultant and in the corporate context. This is essential reading for managers and leaders of public and private organizations who want to establish strategic foresight practices, as well as students of foresight and managers in the fields of innovation, research & development and marketing"--

Unter Szenarioplanung versteht man eine spezielle Methode der Vorhersage zukünftiger politischer, ökonomischer und demographischer Entwicklungen, die das Funktionieren eines Unternehmens beeinflussen können. Diese Technik wird hier von renommierten Vorreitern auf diesem Gebiet ausführlich beleuchtet - so lernt der Manager, verschiedene Implikationen plausibler Ereignisse und Einflüsse systematisch zu durchdenken. (11/97)

This practical guide offers a straight forward and step-by-step approach to developing foresight for organizations of all types. Providing a simple model that can be expanded and adapted as needed, this book introduces the fundamentals of good futures thinking in a four step process complete with ready-to-use worksheets, clear process steps, and checklists for good daily habits and critical assessments.

Policymakers prepare society for the future and this book provides a practical toolkit for preparing pro-active, future-proof scientific policy advice for them. It explains how to make scientific advisory strategies holistic. It also explains how and where biases, which interfere with the proper functioning of the entire science-policy ecosystem, arise and investigates how emotions and other biases affect the understanding and assessment of scientific evidence. The book advocates explorative foresight, systems thinking, interdisciplinarity, bias awareness and the anticipation of undesirable impacts in policy advising, and it offers practical guidance for them. Written in an accessible style, the book offers provocative reflections on how scientific policy advice should be sensitive to more than scientific evidence. It is both an appealing introductory text for everyone interested in science-based policy and a valuable guide for the experienced scientific adviser and policy scholar. "This book is a valuable read for all stakeholders in the scientific advisory ecosystem. Lieve Van Woensel offers concrete methods to bridge the gap between scientific advice and policy making, to assess the possible societal impacts of complex scientific and technological developments, and to support decision-makers’ more strategic understanding of the issues they have to make decisions about. I was privileged to see them proove their value as I worked with Lieve on the pilot project of the Scientific Foresight unit for The European Parliament’s STOA panel.” - Kristel Van der Elst, CEO, The Global Foresight Group; Executive Head, Policy Horizons Canada “A must-read for not only scientific policy advisers, but also those interested in the ethics of scientific advisory processes. Lieve Van Woensel walks readers through a well-structured practical toolkit that bases policy advice on more than scientific evidence by taking into account policies’ potential effects on society and the environment.” - Dr Paul Rübig, Former Member of the European Parliament and former Chair of the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology

Flash Foresight offers seven radical principles you need to transform your business today. From internationally renowned technology forecaster Daniel Burrus—a leading consultant to Google, Proctor & Gamble, IBM, and many other Fortune 500 firms—with John David Mann, co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Go-Giver, comes this systematic, easy-to-implement method for identifying new business opportunities and solving difficult problems in the twenty-first century marketplace.

This note explains the value of strategic foresight and provides implementation advice based on the IMF’s experience with scenario planning and policy gaming. Section II provides an overview of strategic foresight and some of its tools. Scenario planning and policy gaming have been the Fund’s main foresight techniques so far, though other tools have been complementary. Accordingly, section III focuses on the scenario planning by illustrating applications before detailing the methods we have been using, while section IV describes policy gaming including the matrix policy gaming approach with which we have experimented so far. Section V summarizes the key points. In so doing, the note extends an invitation to those in the economics and finance fields (e.g., researchers, policymakers) to incorporate strategic foresight in their analysis and decision making.