How to build your future? With Foresight (prospective)
The prospective approach is ideal for anticipating the future, defining the company’s vision in the broadest sense, building a long-term strategy for a sector, a company or a territory and/or driving change. It will therefore helps with:
- ecosystem, drivers, actors mapping, phenomena and trends identification
- scenarios building for the possible futures
Foresight Definition
“Foresight is anticipation to inform present action (the decision) in the light of possible and desirable futures” as defined by Mr Godet.
Le futur est plus à construire qu’à prédire
Gaston Berger, the father of foresight (and Maurice Béjart)…
Tools & Techniques
Foresight methodology exploits tools and techniques used in other disciplines. These ones are indeed illustrated in the Popper diamond.
Firstly, where a couple of techniques focus on creativity, other ones focus on facts. Secondly, as for the approaches, they can be expert or rather collective. Thirdly, they evolve on a qualitative and quantitative axis.
As a result, there are a lot of options to choose from!
Prospective Approach Steps
Let us start with setting the problem … and the questions to answer
Here again, it will be important to define the scope of the project in terms of theme, territory (geography and nature), temporality, objectives, … and, as for any project, in terms of budget and deadline.
Tme will come to choose an approach amongst the numerous ones: exploratory, strategic, visionary, procedural or prescriptive
As next step, we will carry out a state of play by identifying the actors and drivers of change. We will afterwards map them on a system, according to their degree of influence
We will conduct surveys of participants: experts, citizens, mixed group, … and as a result formulate hypotheses of evolution The collection of information can of course be carried out using various techniques: interview, questionnaire, workshop, … It is important to note that these are indeed hypotheses and not forecasts!
At this stage, we can build scenarios based on a heuristic, morphological, bifurcation method, … by thinking as broadly as possible and without constraints. By the way, Risk Management also adopts this approach to building scenarios with “worst case” and “best case” scenarios.
Among these futures, we will explore those that are possible and desirable.
Time has come to define strategic options
And to finally Lead Change!