Using Strategic Foresight to Influence Organizational Change

Note: this is a research excerpt from Roxanne Nicolussi’s “Bigger Thinking for Smaller Enterprises”, published in 2017 and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Predicting the future is impossible; however, understanding trends that may shape the future is an important part of developing a strategy that can manage uncertainty and minimize risk. The use of foresight can help inform the strategy and subsequently create change for an organization.

Infusing strategy development processes with foresight methodology ensures the strategy is futures ready — flexible for the range of challenges and opportunities the future may bring (Conway, 2016). Foresight approaches consider a wide range of aspects that may influence the future of an organization’s business: social, technological, economic, environmental, political, and values-based emerging issues and trends (Jackson, 2013). Additionally, they take a big picture or systems approach to identify drivers leading potential global and systemic changes that can affect the future landscape. By omitting this kind of analysis, strategists have an incomplete picture of change shaping the organization’s future and, as a result, may miss significant disruptors for which the organization should be preparing. Foresight is the only way to reduce uncertainty.

Gluck, Kaufman, Walleck, McLeod, and Stuckey (2000) for McKinsey & Company outlined forecast-based planning as the second step of…