Insight (Foresight Book 3)

Foresight (Foresight Book 1)

---

Through its foresight activities, Sitra actively participates in societal discussion, putting particular emphasis on making sure that future development trends are taken into account in any given decision. The Sitra Trends List is a central outcome of our foresight activities. The list is cementing its position as a widely used tool for the strategy work of our stakeholders. As part of its study activities, Sitra has also been developing its vision on sustainable well-being since Reports published in and included descriptions of the principles of sustainable well-being and the measures that could allow Finnish society to make the leap and embrace sustainable well-being.

In our work with societal visions has focused on the renewal of the Nordic model see The Next Era of well-being. Sustainable well-being has also been promoted in the following projects: Front page Off to a good start.

Our vision the next era of well-being. Our work Painting the future brighter. Sustainable everyday life A circular economy Climate solutions. Kennedy with his advisors, and has been employed by several of our more innovative Presidents since.

See a Problem?

It is also at the heart of our new crowd innovation platforms, like 99 Designs for graphic design, and Open Ideo for crowdsourced designs for global development and social good. Scenarios are possible futures that we should consider as inputs to strategy.

Scenario learning the term Fahey and Randall use to describe the best way to use scenarios in organizations, is an even better term than scenario planning , the currently most popular term for this specialty practice. Scenario learning puts the focus on the way scenarios help us in our Do loop, beginning with Skills 1 learning , 2 anticipation and 3 innovation , as inputs to strategy Skill 4 , rather than putting the focus on planning, which is an output of Skill 5 that we do prior to execution action.

Reward Yourself

In Inevitable Surprises , he says that Shell also anticipated the fall of the Soviet Union in the late s. Shell was able to capitalize on both of these events, and become significantly larger and more profitable relative to their competitors, not because they predicted them, but because they had creatively pre-imagined them, and then created good strategy Skill 4 and put it on the shelf in case those possible and significant events actually happened. That foresight allowed Shell to beat other large oil companies to execution Skill 5 and reaping the benefits of that execution.

With regard to the fall of the Soviet Union, Shell foresighters realized that event, if it happened, would allow them to gain very favorable long term year gas contracts with Russia if they moved early in the new Russian administration, and they positioned themselves politically to be the first into Russia after the US changed the laws, allowing Western companies to make those contractual relationships in a post-Cold War world.

As Learning from the Future makes clear, it is important to have sufficient diversity in your scenarios to capture all the possible futures that are significant. Constructing three scenarios, with one middle of the road, and two being opposites, along some important variable, is a terrible approach, as it causes strategists to discount the extremes and focus on the middle, which may not be the most likely future, or the most important to previsualize.

The slide above right, by foresighter Adam Gordon , author of the excellent book on trend foresight, Future Savvy indicates how the GBN Scenario Construction method works, in an exercise exploring the futures of arctic marine navigation. This is certainly more useful than a three scenario approach, but we must remember there are often many more than two variables or trends that matter, so a whole variety of combinations should be considered. Fahey and Randall recommend looking deeply at at least five scenarios.

Buy for others

Having an odd number increases the chance that you might not miss something important. They are focused on new processes, products, and projects that can become profitable enterprises. In a world where creative destruction and technological unemployment are constantly eliminating jobs, entrepreneurship seems a particularly rewarding function for foresight. Foresight professionals that make their client firms more innovative, entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial able to generate new business ventures from within established firms provide them with a lasting ability to survive in conditions of ongoing uncertainty—a foundational foresight skill.

At the same time…

As long as a firm can stay either as or more creative than its competitors, it can have several strategies in play that are gaining traction in the marketplace at any time. Its creative drive can continually keep it alive, even if it stumbles or moves backward for a time. All those that lead the future cultivate a perennial startup culture and mindset.

Recall our discussion of emotional intelligence and the ECA cycle in Chapter 2. To retrain our subconscious emotional-cognitive systems to be more comfortable with risk and innovation, Hardy proposes it is better to read one good book on such topics several times, until its lessons are no longer scary and are internalized, than to read several good books one time each. Great innovators take personal responsibility for leading by example.

Successful innovation is still such a scarce skill that a past track record of entrepreneurial innovation has significant momentum attached to it. Recalling military strategist John Boyd, the fastest and most resource efficient form of innovation is Idea Generation. Any foresight professional who tries to imagine one or a range of possible futures, in a way that will achieve any degree of market success, for example, getting accepted by clients as plausible, is using this function.

But the value of creative ideation can be poor if it is not based on good learning Skill 1 , subject to careful convergent selection Skill 3 and critical feedback and review Skill 8. Facilitators can be thought of as the catalyst that helps people collaborate, and engage in collective intelligence learning , anticipation, innovation, and the arrival at consensus strategy. All the best foresight leaders have a lot of experience with facilitation, which includes everything from designing good meetings to conflict management and mediation.

Children need room to explore, experiment, make mistakes and generally feel independent. That being said, there is still a lot of oversight that goes into parenting. Achieving the right balance and prioritizing oversight is the real challenge.

Foresight (Foresight Book 1) by E.j. McBride

Skateboard in the house? Playing with that family heirloom?

Using a knife to separate Legos? Is he up too high? Is he having a fight with sharp blades of grass? Is that kid pushing your daughter at the top of the slide?

FORESIGHT AND INSIGHT

Are they off in the woods, out of sight and oblivious? Kids find very creative things to do with food. It would mean the world to me: Sign in Get started.

• UTOPIA TROPICAL (Spanish Edition)
• The Day Job
• The Corner 7
• The Ghosts of Epidoris: Cap Kennedy Book 14
• Taken at the Flood V1
• Love Notes For My Butterfly