You will do a strategic forecasting exercise in one or more sessions. Before you hold your first session you’ve got some setting up to do, to make sure it’s as productive as possible.

Set clear objectives

What do you want the future to look like? Be imaginative and ambitious. But also be specific, for example using key performance indicators (KPIs).

Invite your stakeholders

Strategic foresight works best when you involve lots of different people, not just experts in your field or industry. So go ahead and invite people from adjacent fields, or communities who will be affected.

You should invite people whose job it is to care about the future not just the day-to-day present.

Choose a facilitator

Your facilitator could be someone in your organisation, or someone neutral you bring in from outside. 

They will plan, arrange and run sessions, and interpret and report on the outcomes.

Mission and vision

Your organisation might already have mission and vision statements. If you don’t, strategic foresight starts by coming up with some. These statements should say in very clear and simple language:

• What you want to do (your mission)
• How you hope to do it (your vision)

Even if you already have mission and vision statements, consider revisiting them if they aren’t written in the clearest, plainest language possible. Clarity is going to be very important for your strategic foresight sessions

You could use the 5 Whys technique to get under the skin of:

• why you do what you currently do
• why you do it the way you do

Analysis of external events

Next, look at things outside your organisation that could affect your success. You can use a scheme like STEEPLE to do this from a number of different angles. STEEPLE stands for:

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

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.

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.

The futures cone

Now take everything you’ve just captured and populate a ‘futures cone’, based on how:

• likely it is to happen
• far in the future it might happe

Useful categories for how likely something is to happen are:

• projected (your best guess at what will actually happen)
• probable (highly likely)
• plausible (might happen, but not highly likely)
• possible (can happen, at least theoretically not impossible)
• preposterous (could theoretically happen, but is infeasible or absurd)

[Futures cone diagram, p20 and p21 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

Timeline of anticipated events

Plot everything in the ‘projected’ and ‘probable’ categories on a separate single line to create a timeline of anticipated events. Write a short description of what the future as a whole looks like, based on those events.

You can include some ‘plausible’ events if you want to capture a bit more uncertainty.

Now you have a picture of what the future might look like, you can start to plan interventions and strategies. Or in other words, what to do and how. The aim of your interventions and strategies is to make your preferred future more likely. 

How might we…?

Choose an area of the future to focus on. Then start this next part of the process with a ‘How might we…?’ exercise, to come up with ideas for interventions that:

• are feasible, viable and desirable
• support your vision
• take account of the likely future or futures

Don’t hold back. Seemingly ridiculous ideas are welcome! Encourage everyone to build on each other’s ideas by saying ‘yes and…’ not ‘no but…’.

Develop a strategy for each idea

For now, choose a single intervention idea (yes, only one!) You could use a tool like affinity mapping to group ideas and help you pick which areas to focus on.

Write a statement that ties together:

• the future you have chosen to focus on
• your vision
• your chosen intervention idea

You can use a template like:

• In the future [the area you are focusing on] is expected to become [the extrapolated future in that area].
• In response, our strategy is to implement [your intervention] through a [the core principle you are following according to your vision] approach.
• In doing this, we will become a [the type of organisation you will become by following this strategy].

Define the strategic future

Add to your statement by putting measures of success on it. This might include things like key performance indicators (KPIs).

The template might continue with:

• With successful implementation of [your intervention] the future will match our [vision statement] by [some qualitative measures].
• We can also measure this achievement by [some other qualitative measures].

You can go through this process for as many areas of the future as you have time for and think are important, to come up with multiple interventions and strategies for implementing them.

Finally, it is time to put some more detail on your plans.

The locus of control

Take each strategy you have developed and put it at the centre of a ‘locus of control’. This is a map of how your strategy could be affected by probable, plausible, possible and preposterous futures, and how much control or influence you have over the knock-on effects.

[Locus of control (strategic ripple) diagram, p36 and 37 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

You might have:

• total control over what you do
• some influence over how stakeholders react
• no control at all over external events

Strategic roadmapping

Create a strategic roadmap (also known as a routemap) of everything you will need to do to implement each strategy and bring you to your strategic future.

To do this, you can plan:

• forwards from the present to the future (forecasting or futurecasting)
• backwards from the future you are aiming for (backcasting or future backcasting)

[Routemap diagram, p38 and 39 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

You can add detail to and iterate on your roadmap by:

• doing a gap analysis to check what you’ve missed
• updating your existing strategic future to create a new and more ambitious ‘blue-sky’ strategic future
• revisiting your roadmap in the light of this new strategic future

[Revised routemap diagram, p40 and 40 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

Turbulent futures and wild cards

If you want to plan for more unlikely futures, you can go back to your futures cone and pull out things that were in the ‘possible’ and ‘preposterous’ categories. These are your wild cards.

Go back to your timeline of anticipated events from earlier, and put any wild cards you want to consider on the timeline. Think about how the wild card would affect the future. Then adjust your strategic roadmap to take it into account.

Write a pre-mortem

At this stage you could do a pre-mortem. Ask everyone to imagine a future where something has gone wrong and they are doing a post-mortem to find out what happened.

You can immerse people in the fantasy by asking them to write an email explaining exactly what happened at each stage from start to failure.

Contingency plans

You could use your pre-mortem to develop mitigation strategies for the possible points of failure you have identified.

You can catalogue possible risks by how likely they are to happen and how bad it would be if they did. You can’t plan for every eventuality, but things that are either highly likely or have catastrophic consequences (or both!) are good targets for contingency planning.