CIFS Toolkit for Applied Strategic Foresight

This collection of tools and approaches has been carefully curated and refined based on our own extensive experience in the field of foresight

Welcome to the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies’ Foresight toolkit.

This collection of tools and approaches has been carefully curated and refined based on our own extensive experience in the field of foresight, combined with insights drawn from other thinkers and practitioners.

While the toolkit will help you apply strategic foresight to your work, it will not teach you how to predict the future, or provide you with definitive answers. It can help you explore and analyse emerging change and possible futures as a powerful and valuable addition to your strategic thinking, but it cannot tell you when to act, or exactly what to do.

The toolkit is also not a beginner's step-by-step guide to each of the tools nor a theoretical overview. Rather, the toolkit offers practical insights, honed through many years of CIFS’ applied foresight work. It gives an overall description of each tool/approach, along with key considerations that can help in successfully delivering the technique. The tools are adaptable, and can hence be customised to meet the needs of most futures projects.

Examples of Tools

Foresight tools are primarily designed to aid us in challenging assumptions and unawareness about what could be true in the future. It involves a deliberate effort to counteract biases in decision-making that make us believe the future will merely reflect what we are able to see in the past and present. As uncertainty grows and predetermined outcomes become less certain, relying solely on forecasts and trend analysis (and sometimes hype cycles) can provide a false sense of understanding.

The Futures Triangle

The Futures Triangle, developed by Sohail Inayatullah, serves as an intuitive tool to guide our thinking and help us map the dynamics at play when change occurs across the three dimensions that shape future outcomes: The push of the present, the pull from the future, and the weight of history. The tension and interaction between these three forces highlights that the way future change occurs depends on the outcome of the ‘friction field’ created between different forces. This helps us recognise that change is often not straightforward, and always multifaceted, as it is shaped by interacting forces.

Enablers and Blockers

The way future change occurs depends on the outcome of the power struggle between enabling and limiting forces. Forecasting methods typically derive trends from past data and extrapolate these trends forward without much consideration of the forces that nurture the trend and may eventually alter it. By utilising the Enablers & Blockers framework, we can get a better understanding of the dynamics of change of a given trend development. This understanding is gained by identifying underlying dynamics in favouring forces (enablers) that create, sustain and catalyse a trend, and limiting forces (blockers) that stand in the way of a trend and slow it down, possibly even diverting it.

The Three Horizons

The Three Horizons framework, developed by Bill Sharpe, is useful to assess pathways of change, and how change can unfold over different time horizons. The framework assumes that change happens in waves in which a dominant form is eventually overtaken and displaced by another. Emerging change will challenge our current paradigm and assumptions, and over time today’s decisions, policies, and products will become obsolete. This is particularly useful for understanding societal transitions, where a status quo or dominant system declines, and a new system rises in its place.

Scenario Development

Scenarios as a method is one of the main concepts and most widely used methods in foresight. Both public and private sector organisations have implemented scenarios for a wide array of functions to support better longer-term strategic anticipation. Scenario planning offers a structured approach that describes a plausible set of future conditions that are different to the present. This allows organisations to consider alternative future outcomes representing novel perspectives and contexts – as well as discontinuities – that may be difficult to grasp in the present.

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