Are you in a place where you want to kick-start foresight, but you are not sure how to start? You can start simple and you can succeed. But you probably can’t just leap in with a big splash, even if you’re the chief. You need to lay some groundwork.
Below are seven ways to get started that will help you:
- Test the waters for foresight in the organization
- Get the organization used to the idea of exploring the future
- Learn how to explore your future effectively, and learn what works best in your situation
- Build a name for yourself in your organization for foresight
What you can do:
- Have an actual conversation about your organization’s future, an open, thoughtful, creative one, with colleagues. Then talk about how it went, what it meant to everyone, and how you can have more—far more such conversations. This is a show-them-what-it-would-be-like moment, and may be essential to building your case for more foresight. You could establish a pattern of having lunch discussions on critical futures topics, such as “first Friday” of the month. If you can get interesting future-focused guests to share insights, so much the better
- Find kindred spirits in your organization that will join you in exploring the future, and encourage you, remind you, challenge you in doing so. You might do this by sharing an article or blog post on the future, and seeing who seems interested. Or schedule a brown bag lunch discussion, e.g. as described in no. 1 here. Keep in touch with these folks, involve them, seek their counsel. Build a foresight community.
- Do environmental scanning–Start learning about the wider world of forces, trends, issues, challenges, and opportunities that you face. That means carving out some time to do what is called environmental scanning–exploring for new trends, ideas, issues across all sorts of media. Join listserv and other online discussions on the future, and become a channel of new insights from those into your organization. It won’t seem like you are doing your work at first, maybe, but as soon as you discover fresh insights and see how they fit, you’ll feel justified in the time spent. You probably do these things anyway. Bring a focus to it, and pay out results.
- Pay it forward—Pay it forward means sharing your new insights on change as widely as you can, as noted. Pick up the role of scout for things important to your organization. Share discoveries, and build yourself a reputation for valued insights.
- Find outside encouragement, e.g. joining with others in professional associations who explore the future and strategy. Examples include the Association for Professional Futurists, the World Future Society, the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals. Some of those organizations have local chapters and each has a vigorous online presence. They are not expensive to join.
- Get visible about it–Commandeer a wall, whiteboard, or similar, and put some questions up: “What are the top trends shaping our future?” “What are we not talking about that we should?” Get a conversation going, share and nurture the comments.
- Play the role of futurist–Make a habit of saying, in every reasonable place at a meeting or in a discussion, “can we take a moment and look at how this plays out, longer term?” Playing this gentle but persistent futurist role will keep the future a part of the conversation. Be the futurist in the room.
Good luck!
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