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Strategic Foresight is a valuable asset for organizations that want to improve their preparedness, competitiveness, and resiliency in an increasingly uncertain world of rapid change. What steps can you and your organization take to benefit from what Foresight has to offer?
Identify resources
What staff and budget can you harness to make Foresight a regular part of your organization? Can you assign someone as the Foresight focal point, and provide them with support? More and more organizations are including Foresight and futures thinking as part of a designated staff member’s job description. Reserve funds in your very next budget for identifying weak signals, pinpointing trends, identifying drivers of change, and elaborating scenarios.
Revisit what you think you know
Challenge the assumptions underpinning your operational plans, policies and strategies. Are they valid? The intertwined health and economic crises have dramatically altered the way that many businesses operate, and have stimulated government spending, new public programs, and the adoption or revision of rules, regulations and legislation. Meanwhile, underlying trends — many related to digital technologies — have in some cases accelerated during the pandemic. If your previous assumptions are wrong, your existing plans of action need to be updated.
Start scanning
Begin a systematic scan of developments in and around the environment in which your organization operates. Be alert to changes that could have a domino effect. When Indian officials issued stay-at-home orders to urban residents to limit the spread of the virus, many people in the informal economy lost their livelihoods. Millions of jobless migrants returned to rural areas, infecting local populations in areas with weaker health services. Public authorities in many jurisdictions have encouraged the wearing of facemasks to reduce transmission of the virus. As a result, millions of tons of used masks, and other personal protective equipment, like gloves, have clogged sewers and water treatment facilities, and added to ocean pollution.
In the US, 52% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 were living with their parents in July 2020, a record high. The sudden new living…
