Increasing the Real-World Impact of Futures Thinking
As a foresight practitioner with over a decade of experience, I’ve noticed a recurring issue in our field: the lack of lasting impact of our work. Let me paint a familiar situation:
The scenarios are done. You might even have done some backcasting. The report is written, including a beautiful slide deck with the key findings. You’ve given the final presentation. The client is happy. The invoice is paid. And then … nothing happens. You check in with the client and ask about how they are doing with all the insights and recommendations and they say something about some short-term priorities that have taken over and how they are still waiting for the meeting with the CEO, and how they are about to be transferred to another department, but how they always like to think back to our project and how much fun they had.
This scenario illustrates a common problem in foresight work: the disconnect between the insights we provide and their practical implementation. If you think of the work of an organization as a huge comprehensive process that goes from foresight (what might be on the horizon?) to strategy (how do we get there?) to tactics and implementation (what’s next?), there’s a huge gap between foresight and strategy.
One factor contributing to this gap is the structure and focus of many organizations’ strategy departments. These departments often operate under constraints that make it challenging to fully leverage foresight insights. They may be understaffed, undervalued, or primarily focused on short-term horizons – typically concentrating on the next quarter or fiscal year rather than long-term futures. As a result, they often lack the resources, bandwidth, or mandate to effectively incorporate and act upon foresight findings. This challenge is compounded in organizations where it’s not even clear which department or team is responsible for implementing foresight insights.
Yet, as foresight practitioners, we also bear a great deal of responsibility for the mediocre impact of our work. We put a lot of thought into the process of developing our scenarios and recommendations but then we “fire and forget” them into the organization and move on. I’m guilty of this myself. I‘ve done a lot of futures reports and scenario projects over the last decade – work I’m really proud of. But when I look at how little impact they had in the end, it bugs me. And when I look at our industry, I can clearly see that I’m not alone. The meager impact we’re having also has an economic effect. Foresight studios and trend agencies have to constantly attract new clients because the old ones are not coming back for new business. If our work made the impression we think it should, it wouldn’t be the first thing to be cut from budgets in tough times.
To meet these challenges and increase the impact of foresight work, we need to rethink our approach from the very beginning of a project.
The Beginning of Foresight: Critical Questions
At the beginning of a foresight project, the client comes to you with a question or an objective. Basically they want to be able to make a decision, whether it is about the way forward, the choice of a strategy or an investment, or more generally to be more aware of what might lie ahead. But even before agreeing on the budget and the process, it helps to ask a series of questions:
About the Project
- What is the client’s current understanding of the issue or topic they wish to explore?
- Are there alternative ways of framing the issue that might lead to different insights?
- What are the boundaries of the topic, and are they appropriate for the client’s needs?
- What time horizon is being considered, and is it appropriate for the topic?
- How will the client measure the success of the foresight project?
About the Context
- What specific events or trends have prompted this foresight initiative?
- What internal and external factors influence the client’s perspective?
- What sources of information does the client rely on, and are they sufficiently diverse?
About the Client
- What is the organization’s past experience with foresight projects, including their implementation?
- How open is the organization to challenging its current views and considering disruptive change?
- Who are the key stakeholders for this project, and what are their decision-making cycles?
All of these questions will help you decode the client’s briefing and better understand, what they are looking for.
Another set of questions explores the underlying assumptions and unconscious preconceptions about the future that every organization has, which could be summarized as its futures culture.
About the Client’s Futures Culture
- What role does the future play in the organization’s strategy and operations?
- How do “official” and “hidden” future narratives coexist within the organization?
- What range of future scenarios is the organization willing to consider, and what’s off limits?
- How does the organization typically deal with risk and uncertainty?
In most foresight projects, this futures culture of a client is never outlined. It usually only becomes apparent when something in the foresight project goes against it and there is suddenly strong pushback, such as when you present interim results to a manager and he gets angry for no apparent reason.
That’s why it’s so helpful to uncover an organization’s futures culture at the beginning of a project. But there’s another set of questions that should be asked at the beginning of a foresight project.
About the Implementation
- How does the client plan to use the results of this foresight project?
- What processes and resources are in place to act on the foresight findings?
- What are the potential barriers to implementing the project’s findings?
As these questions make clear, it is enormously helpful to plan the project for maximum impact and implementability. In other words, think about the end of the foresight project.
In order to continue to develop this series of questions, I’ve added a note to my digital garden.
The End of Foresight: Beyond the Final Report
As we approach the end of a foresight project, we need to think strategically about how to maximize its impact. I suggest thinking about this on three levels:
- The ground level is the planning of actions that follow the delivery of the final report or whatever the final deliverable might be. For example, this could be an internal road show where the results are presented to different parts of an organization. Each part would receive a contextualized version of the findings to make clear how the anticipated futures might affect them. This could be combined with a workshop to help the audience to work through the recommendations together and derive their own next steps and future projects.For example, for our work with the German public broadcaster SWR on a futures report on the media landscape, we also developed different workshop designs so that the client team could work with different departments to apply the insights from the report to their contexts, from editorial teams thinking about the needs of their future listeners to technical departments.
- The intermediary level would help the organization move from a one-time foresight project to an ongoing foresight engagement. Rather than throwing the report over the fence, it shows them that for foresight to have a greater impact on their business, they need to revisit trends and scenarios on a regular basis. The world is constantly changing and they need to adapt. The necessary condition for this level is that the ground level is already established and has shown results. If the client is not yet sure whether the foresight project has been worthwhile, it will be difficult to give the green light to an ongoing project. But if the feedback from different departments is that the engagement with the project results was helpful, the case is easier to make.
- At the last level I see a stronger intersection between foresight and organizational development. After all, the challenges of implementing foresight insights and recommendations are at the level of organizational design. Organizations are not set up to deal with different futures. They usually don’t have positions and processes mandated to do so. That’s why they have a hard time adapting to change and dealing with new developments, from the climate crisis to AI. In a way, foresight makes this fundamental problem more visible without being able to fix it. That’s why I’m very interested in the intersection of foresight and organizational development.
These levels are just a starting hypothesis for me to explore further how we can bridge the gap between foresight work and the rest of an organization. I know from experience that design can play a crucial role in making futures work more tangible. But it still doesn’t fully translate into impact.
In conclusion, to increase the impact of foresight work, we need to think critically about both the beginning and the end of our projects. By asking the right questions at the outset and planning for implementation from the outset, we can bridge the gap between foresight and action. As practitioners, we have a responsibility to ensure that our work doesn’t just imagine futures, but helps to shape them. I invite you to share your experiences and thoughts on how we can make foresight work more impactful.
