Episode 105 - Strategic Foresight

<h2><strong>SUMMARY</strong></h2> <p class="">How do you plan when the future is uncertain? Strategic foresight is a great approach to figuring out how to think about the future.</p> <p class="" data-rte-preserve-empty="true"> </p> <h2><strong>TRANSCRIPT</strong></h2> <p class="">Hello and welcome to episode 105 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explore strategic foresight and how to think about the future when things are uncertain.</p> <p class="">It’s a classic challenge - how do we lead others through times of uncertainty when we’re not clear ourselves? Perhaps our industry is going through significant change. Or perhaps you report into a leadership team that haven’t provided a clear strategy and direction. We can’t just make things up - that’s not fair on our team - so what do we do?</p> <p class="">What we need is strategic foresight, which is outlined in a great Harvard Business Review article with the intriguing title - Learning from the Future.</p> <p class="">The author of the article, J Peter Scoblic, says of strategic foresight that the “aim is not to predict the future but rather to make it possible to imagine multiple futures in creative ways that heighten our ability to sense, shape, and adapt to what happens in the years ahead. Strategic foresight doesn’t help us figure out <strong>what</strong> to think about the future. It helps us figure out <strong>how</strong> to think about it.”</p> <p class="">He outlined the following six stage process for Strategic Foresight - invite, identify, imagine, inhabit, isolate and implement:</p> <ul data-rte-list="default"> <li> <p class="">The first stage is <strong>INVITE</strong> - we need to invite the right people to participate. Senior leaders don’t have exclusive rights to think about the future. Rather than just involving those with the greatest responsibility, it is often better to involve those with the greatest vision. That might include some people closest to your customers, or p