Episode Details

How do you plan when the future is uncertain? Strategic foresight is a great approach to figuring out how to think about the future.

Hello and welcome to episode 105 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explore strategic foresight and how to think about the future when things are uncertain.

It's a classic challenge - how do we lead others through times of uncertainty when we're not clear ourselves? Perhaps our industry is going through significant change. Or perhaps you report into a leadership team that haven't provided a clear strategy and direction. We can't just make things up - that's not fair on our team - so what do we do?

What we need is strategic foresight, which is outlined in a great Harvard Business Review article with the intriguing title - Learning from the Future.

The author of the article, J Peter Scoblic, says of strategic foresight that the "aim is not to predict the future but rather to make it possible to imagine multiple futures in creative ways that heighten our ability to sense, shape, and adapt to what happens in the years ahead. Strategic foresight doesn't help us figure out what to think about the future. It helps us figure out how to think about it."

He outlined the following six stage process for Strategic Foresight - invite, identify, imagine, inhabit, isolate and implement:

• The first stage is INVITE - we need to invite the right people to participate. Senior leaders don't have exclusive rights to think about the future. Rather than just involving those with the greatest responsibility, it is often better to involve those with the greatest vision. That might include some people closest to your customers, or people who have joined from other industries. We really want to bring together a group of people that are diverse in their thinking and experience, and open to new possibilities.

• The second stage is IDENTIFY - here we think about assumptions that we might be making as an organisation. We also explore the key drivers for our organisation and any uncertainties in the market.

• The third stage is called IMAGINE. This involves imagining what Scoblic describes as plausible, but dramatically different, futures. So let's take my business as an example. We're focus on helping people to become even better leaders. I could imagine a few different futures - where leadership development was only face-to-face, only online, some mix of the two, only live, only on-demand. From that diverse range of potential futures, I could then take the three that were most plausible.

• The fourth stage is to INHABIT each of those futures. Here we want to really experience what each future could be like, and what that might mean for us. You could encourage your team to describe what each future looks like, how people might respond, and what might or might not be possible.

• The fifth stage is to ISOLATE strategies that will be useful across multiple possible futures. Again, with my business, running through a range of options back at the end 2018 showed me that online delivery and content development was something I should focus on. It was a strategy that would work across a range of likely futures.

• The final stage is IMPLEMENT. This is where we take those strategies and put them in place.

Why not undertake a strategic foresight activity with your team. Here are some questions to help:

• What trends do you see in your market? What are the emerging opportunities and threats?

• What are some likely futures for your organisatio