This method can help understand things outside your organisation that could affect your success. 

You can use a method like STEEPLE as part of a wider piece of work called strategic foresight.

STEEPLE stands for:

• socio-cultural
• technological
• economic
• environmental
• political
• legal
• ethical

For each category, think of what could go wrong, and what could go well, in big and small ways.

Start off wildly pessimistic. Write down everything from minor hiccups to complete catastrophe.

Then be radically optimistic. Imagine small wins as well as the most outlandishly successful scenarios.

Alternative approaches

If you don’t need to go into as much detail as STEEPLE, you can skip categories you don’t want to consider.

For example, PESTLE misses out the legal and ethical categories. But for inclusive innovation, we think it is important to not to miss out ethics!

Strategic foresight

If you want to do a more detailed analysis of the present and future, then you can use a method called Strategic foresight.

Strategic foresight is a method to help you make:

• informed best guesses about the future
• better decisions about what to do about it

Strategic foresight has 3 main stages, each of which can have multiple steps:

1. Understand the landscape and decide on your vision for the future
2. Decide what to do and how to do it (interventions and strategies)
3. Make a roadmap, and contingency plans for when things go wrong

Further source reading

For more detail on all the stages and steps of strategic foresight, see Connected Places Catapult’s Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime: A Practical Guide to Charting and Realising Desired Futures (PDF, XXX kb)