Foresight is more than seeing the future

Too often attempts to stimulate innovation rely on the belief that innovation can come from anyone in the enterprise. Innovation efforts can produce a lot of activity with few results, especially when it is left to everyone. What is required from leadership is compelling, clear and focused direction for where innovations are actually needed.

Opportunity Foresight provides forward-thinking leaders with an approach to identify and agree upon relevant factors shaping the future external landscape. This foresight practice area helps clients surface compelling targets of opportunity to focus and direct innovator communities and teams. Clients have used this approach for targeting their invention efforts, as a prelude to their strategic planning efforts, and as a foundation for scenario planning. 

In collaboration with a small core team, we organize, design and facilitate a series of leadership conversations. We begin with surfacing divergent mental models about the future (beliefs) and converge on an agreed upon set of explicit assumptions (and uncertainties).

When leadership gets clearer about future external realities before deciding what to do about them, opportunities to innovate emerge organically with greater coherence and conviction. Subsequent strategic conversations are more robust and alternate scenarios end up more relevant and useful as a result.

 

Opportunity Foresight Sequence