Strategic Foresight: Why Strategic Foresight Is Important

Strategic foresight—also known as futures thinking or futures studies—is a form of future thinking that policymakers employ at political, social, and economic organizations to explore possible futures for their operating environments.

Futurists, or professionals who assist such organizations in understanding alternative futures, use a wide array of methodologies to uncover potential futures. These foresight activities include trend analysis and horizon scanning, which examines drivers of change—such as politics and technology—to understand their possible impact on future scenarios. Futurists provide estimations of probable futures that help organizations make better decisions to meet a preferred future.

Strategic foresight differs from similar methods like strategic forecasting and strategic planning because it does not yield hard data or certainties about the future. Instead, it offers plausible futures for organizations to consider as part of their decision-making process. It also doesn’t produce a strategy or plan; strategic foresight is one part of the planning process that reveals previously unseen information for planners or uncovers potential problems in current strategies.

Strategic foresight matters because of the rapid changes that organizations and governments have undergone in the last decade. Futurists use the acronym “VUCA”—which stands for “volatile,” “uncertain,” “complex,” and “ambiguous”—to describe the current world state under the impact of global problems like pandemics and conflicts.

Previous ways of scenario-planning, which relied on short-term horizon scanning (once or twice a year) that a single entity conducted, could become ineffective under rapidly changing environments. Strategic foresight becomes important to decision-makers in VUCA scenarios because it provides consistent inputs on multiple future scenarios through a wide array of methodologies.

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