How to Kickstart a Continuous Foresight Process with Interactive Workshops

Are you looking for a way to get your team excited about foresight work? Setting up a continuous foresight framework can seem daunting at first, but with the right approach, you can make this important work fun and inspirational. Our Senior Consultant, Foresight Capability Development, Ira Stening walks you through Futures Platform’s foresight workshop concept, Futures Mornings, which provides a bundle of short, engaging sessions for those who’re at the beginning of their foresight journey.

ENGAGE YOUR TEAM AND MAKE FORESIGHT ANALYSIS A ROUTINE

Inspired by the Nudge Theory by 2017 Novelist Richard Thaler and designed by Futures Platform’s foresight experts, Futures Mornings are short, interactive sessions on futures thinking for teams who are just getting started with strategic foresight.

Many organisations face the initial challenge of getting people on board and excited to participate when setting up a foresight function. To overcome this inertia, Futures Mornings sessions offer a lightweight introduction to the key building blocks of continuous and collaborative foresight, covering both theory and practice. With its focus on interactivity and positive reinforcement, the sessions aim to energise and inspire your team, and help make continuous foresight a routine in your organisation.

Events like this also help establish the connection between your operating environment and the possible actions and responses needed to reach preferable futures. What I consider, at times even more valuable, is that they advance the mindset of thinking like a futurist, which is becoming more and more important with the increasing uncertainty of the world we live in.

There’s no set agenda or strict rules with Futures Mornings sessions – the content and the structure can be adjusted to each organisation and its specific needs. While each session may look different, they’re all rooted in the same principle of sparking creativity and encouraging further futures exploration.

Below, we’ll walk you through the practical next steps on how to organise Futures Mornings sessions in your organisation and get your colleagues excited to start exploring futures.

1.    Select a topic

The first step in getting started with your Futures Mornings sessions is to select a topic. You can structure the sessions in sprints around a specific topic, or if you’re new to foresight, you may also want to begin with a ‘Think like a Futurist’ session that introduces the basic principles behind futures thinking and systematic foresight work.

To make the most out of the sessions, it is good to pick a sequence of topics that are both timely and relevant for your organisation. For example, a college providing education in healthcare, logistics and tourism could structure their Futures Mornings sessions around these topics that directly reflect its operational domains, e.g. futures of health and wellbeing, futures of tourism and futures of logistics.

Much in the same way, a construction company specialising in residential housing could run a series of mornings under its strategy-related themes of futures of living, urban environments and transportation.

Another possible approach is introducing novel co-exploration topics, such as the virtual worlds of the future (metaverses) or information operations & cyber security. To encourage your audience to think critically about the future and provide learnings, you can structure your session around the potential opportunities, risks and scenarios related to these novel concepts.

Do you need help with organising Futures Mornings sessions, or want to invite a futurist to introduce foresight to your team? Contact your Customer Success Manager or email us at support@futuresplatform.com, and we’ll help you get started in no time.

2.     Plan the structure and scope of your sessions

Once you’ve chosen your topic, it’s time to map out the key trends and drivers and define the time frame you want to focus on in your sessions. It’s a good idea to involve a colleague or small team at this step and work out a preliminary a future view together with them before the session. You can use Futures Platform’s Horizon Scanning framework to scout the key trends for your topic.

Next, it is time to figure out the practicalities. Ideally, you’ll want to run sequences of Futures Mornings to make foresight a habit and encourage lasting collaboration. We recommend a series of at least three sessions, lasting 60-75 minutes each.

A good way to kickstart the series is to have a senior level professional from your organisation introduce the topic & explain the ‘why’ before starting the futurising part. This often provides the ‘gravitas’ for the event, and thereby attention. You can reserve up to 10 minutes for this part.

You can use the next 15 to 20 minutes to briefly discuss the fundamental principles behind strategic foresight and futures thinking. The idea here is to introduce (not necessarily explain in full detail) a central framework of foresight. You can, for example, focus on one of the many foresight tools, such as the futures cone or the futures triangle, to illustrate the concept and introduce the idea of multiple futures. You may also invite a futurist for this part.

3.     Design interactive exercises around your topic

After you’re done with the introductions, you can use the rest of the time to dive into your selected topic(s) and introduce the future view that you’ve constructed prior to the session. The next step is to design interactive exercises around this future view and the key trends involved, where participants can further discuss the trends and ideate insights on their potential impacts and future directions.

There are many different approaches you, as the facilitator, can take to encourage futures exploration. You can, for example, ask participants to imagine preferred futures around your topic and map the actions your organisation would need to take to shape that future. Alternatively, you can help them challenge their assumptions by asking them to imagine alternative scenarios beyond the most plausible ones.

The facilitator can use affirmative questions to boost the dialogue, such as “Which themes do you agree on?”, “How does this already show in your daily work?”, “Are we missing something?”. This usually gets the dialogue going– and before you know it, time is up!

4.     Keep up the momentum

Your first Futures Morning session is an excellent opportunity to open up your future view for collaborative foresight work and get the ball rolling. For instance, you can ask your colleagues to vote and prioritise the most significant trends and drivers in your context. Alternatively, you can also ask them to identify the missing trends in the future view. Their findings can be shared in the next Futures Morning session.

This collaborative iteration of your future view is how you build momentum between the Futures Mornings sessions. You can brush up on the future view with the help of the comments after each session and present the next iteration on the upcoming session. With this exercise, you’ll also help cement one of the key principles of systematic and collaborative futurising in your organisation:  Examine - Discuss – Update – Re-examine.