Progressive leaders know that creativity and innovation are essential to long-term survival.
Dynamic Foresight redefines leadership for a rapidly changing world. Through our ground-breaking dynamic tool, we assist leaders in anticipating multiple futures, spotting emergent trends, and adapting swiftly. We turn uncertainties into opportunities, preparing you to lead with foresight. Our unique approach blends the power of strategic foresight with strategic design – two fields combined to create a new approach to dealing with change and the future.
Dynamic Futures Tool
Create and refine custom scenarios quickly as conditions change
Imagine the full set of possible futures facing your organization. As you move farther into the future your uncertainty grows. In most traditional approaches to scenario planning, three to six points in the future are identified and described in rich detail as future scenarios. Our dynamic futures tool goes well beyond – empowering leaders to instantly create a future scenario for any point within the cone of uncertainty. This flexibility enables us to work dynamically with your team – adjusting uncertainties and recreating scenarios based on your inputs.
This tool can be applied to any industry – consumer goods, financial services, healthcare and more.
Help your team break out of conventional mindsets.
- Stress-test your current strategies.
- Build the strategic thinking muscles of your team.
- Start anticipating future shifts before your competitors.
- Inform existing portfolio of innovation work.
Design + Foresight
Strategic foresight + design strategy offer a new way to approach future change.
Strategic Foresight builds resiliency in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, embedding an organizational capability to regularly scan the environment. Strategic design provides a set of creative tools to imagine preferable futures and educate teams about cultural shifts and changes.
Together, these approaches provide a vibrant and participatory approach to change. The portfolio of desirable futures – created through a highly collaborative process of experimentation and prototyping – aligns stakeholders and drives meaningful strategic change. Future worlds become more tangible and accessible to a wider audience; from there the team can adapt existing product portfolios and innovate more effectively.
With our extensive experience in both strategic foresight and strategic design, our approach to futures planning is both engaging and actionable.
Experienced Team
Leadership training that strengthens foresight and strategic thinking skills.
The Dynamic Foresight team combines decades of expertise with our commitment to be continually innovating. Our founders and partners have worked with organizations around the world – from multinational corporations to global non-profits. We customize our work to fit your needs and are committed to helping our clients thrive in an uncertain world. Our unique combination of experiential design, design strategy, and strategic foresight translates into highly engaging and immersive workshops. We believe that it’s possible to not only anticipate possible futures, but to develop actionable strategies in the present to prepare for your preferred future.
FAQ
Organizations are increasingly embracing the importance of developing strategic foresight skills of their leaders. Strategic foresight is the systematic examination of potential futures to inform decision-making today. It’s about anticipating possible future trends, envisioning various plausible future scenarios, and planning accordingly. Unlike traditional forecasting which typically uses quantitative data to predict likely outcomes, strategic foresight often involves a more qualitative and creative approach. Dynamic Foresight is a strategic foresight technique specifically designed for environments with a high degree of future uncertainty.
Scenario planning is the most well-known technique used to train leaders to include strategic foresight mindsets in their strategic decision making. Other techniques often used include Delphi methods, horizon scanning, and trend analysis. The goal is not necessarily to predict the future accurately, but to understand a range of potential futures and their implications. This allows organizations, governments, and individuals to be better prepared and more resilient to different future states. It also allows leaders to stress test their short-term investments against possible futures. In the context of business, strategic foresight might be used to explore new markets, anticipate customer needs, identify disruptive technologies, or prepare for potential risks. In public policy, it can help governments plan for long-term challenges such as climate change, demographic shifts, or technological advancements.
While these techniques are valuable and can develop the strategic thinking skills of leaders, they also often have limited application beyond the classroom. Application is limited because the outputs of these sessions quickly become obsolete as the industry keeps shifting post-session. For example, building future scenarios can be costly in time and money yet the final scenarios cannot be easily modified as new uncertainties emerge. Scenarios are essentially snapshot techniques that capture a single set of possible futures created in a single moment of time in the present. The very contexts in which scenario thinking can be most valuable, those with high levels of volatility and change, are the contexts in which the scenarios themselves are least likely to hold their value past the workshops in which they were created.
In a dynamic foresight session, we lead the participants through a foresight process that captures all the benefits of current strategic foresight techniques but in addition leaves participants with output that can be quickly modified to shift as the world shifts. Rather than leaving with 4-6 static future scenarios, participants leave with a structure for creating a virtually endless number of future scenarios and the ability to focus those futures on any uncertainty that is strategically important in that moment. In short, participants will learn a technique for creating dynamic future scenarios that seamlessly connect strategic thinking training with real strategic planning processes and do so in a way that adapts as the world shifts around their organization.
There is a current trend to outsource strategic foresight tasks to AI. This dramatically reduces the value of strategic foresight as a strategic tool and risks generating spurious outputs. Dynamic foresight builds futures from the insights and expertise of the participants and uses AI to streamline the process. We will show participants how to use AI to speed their foresight work without losing the value that comes from working with their team to generate sensemaking about their futures.
