Institute For The Future

Follow Highlights from our Foresight Practitioner Workshop

Today – and for the next couple of days – I’m sharing highlights from our inaugural Foresight Practitioners workshop. Spread over three days, we see the workshop as part of a broader effort to equip leaders of all sorts with tools to make sense of, and plan strategically, with long-range futures in mind:

In a world of rapid and constant change, foresight is a core competency that turns managers into leaders and creates organizations that are more resilient, more nimble, and more vibrant. Now IFTF's Foresight Studio can help you build this core competency and bring it into your own organization—or the organizations you work with.

The session is organized around IFTF’s Foresight-Insight-Action process:

Tuesday, December 2: Foresight

We’ll spend our first day together developing tools to think a decade ahead—and make sense of how to spot the weak signals and emerging innovations that have the potential to transform our long-term landscape—exploring strategies such as filtering signals from noise and extrapolating change from past and present patterns.

Wednesday, December 3: Insight

If foresight is focused on how the world at large could change, insight helps us make that change meaningful, relevant and tangible. On Wednesday, we’ll reconvene to discuss strategies for using personas, scenarios and artifacts from the future to make foresight tangible—and begin to transform external possibilities into meaningful threats and opportunities.

Thursday, December 4: Action

In many ways, the goal of foresight work is to take a break from making difficult decisions and gain perspective—but ultimately, with the aim of returning to those challenges equipped with greater clarity about the long-term future that can inform current decisions. During our final day together, we’ll explore strategies for bridging long-term possibilities with the need to act in the present.

Join us!

We’ll post updates on Twitter at @iftf throughout the event—and look forward to having you join in the conversation.

Spaces are still open for our next workshop in March 2015. Contact us to sign up today!