As the pace of technological advancement increases, it is paramount to plan strategically considering multiple future scenarios. Using strategic foresight tools is a great way to ensure your organization’s future readiness. According to futuresplatform.com, strategic foresight “is a discipline organizations use to gather and process information about their future operating environment”. Foresight is not the same as predicting, rather it embraces uncertainty and tries to approximate what a probable future might be. To achieve this goal, an organization can establish the practice of collecting and analyzing signals, that is socio-cultural, technological, economic, environmental, and political phenomena in the present that exemplify well how the future might be.

The scope of such a project can be broad, including the participation of decision-makers and external researchers. However, running a pilot project that includes employees in your team is a good way to start. I participated in such an initiative and tested different approaches and methods with a team of designers and researchers. Our main challenge was the lack of a system to organize collected signals and accelerate the time to insight. Ultimately, we decided to work on a collaborative board and document the raw data as a CSV file.

As there are excellent sources to learn more about this method, I’ll give you only a short overview of how we conducted the process.

Project Planning

The first step to starting a strategic foresight project is to find a group of enthusiasts willing to participate. To ensure multiple perspectives about the future are being considered it is crucial to have a diverse team concerning gender, ethnicity, disabilities, country of origin, and age. Ideally, the team must include decision-makers and junior employees with and without technical backgrounds.

It is also important to define a research question aligned with the company’s goal and decide for which timeframe we are interested in investigating further developments. An example of a research question is “What will the role’s requirements for UX designers in 10 years be?”.

With a team and a research question in place, it is time to list the most important online sources for news and reports on your topic of interest. The sources should be the most varied as possible so that you have access to a broad range of perspectives and opinions, so that confirmation bias and bandwagon effect bias can be avoided.

Signal Scanning

Team enablement is necessary to make signal spotting part of the foresight team’s daily work. To achieve that the team can create a collaborative board where they paste sticky notes with their insights asynchronously. The most important information to keep is the source link, the reflection it inspired, and keywords that explain the main topics it relates to.

It can also be helpful to use the STEEP+V framework to determine the relevance of each signal to one of the following categories: social, technological, environmental, economic, political, and values. This information is relevant to evaluate whether looking for signals in the less represented categories is necessary, maintaining a more balanced data set.

Spot Trends

After collecting a certain number of signals, the team must discuss them together, adding more insights and pointing out contradictions. A decision is to be made whether the team should continue scanning for more signals, for instance, if some perspectives on the research question are missing.

Once there are enough signals, the team can work on a mind map to understand what topics appear and how they connect. By analyzing how signals interact in the broader landscape, some trends will start to pop up. My team focused on a small set of trends (5 to 10), but some projects work with bigger trend collections.

Finally, the team can enhance its understanding of the phenomena by identifying the drivers behind each trend. It is also interesting to reflect on the tension between drivers and frictions in the system, which can anticipate or delay the development of drivers. The existence of strong forces against one trend, such as regulations and public opinion, impacts the likelihood of a trend becoming mainstream in the future.

Key Takeaways

Independent of how much resources are allocated to long-term planning in your organization, nurturing a future-oriented mindset in the team is highly recommended in times of constant industry disruptions. Being well-informed about your topic of interest is also a great way to plan your career development.