What is strategic foresight?

Start by interacting with all the best minds in your field: the people who know what you do inside and out and can point you toward trends before they happen. Strategists could include your CEO, board of directors, senior team, staff, volunteers or thought leaders within your field. We need to stress that this isn’t a passive opinion survey. This step should be pursued actively, with the intention of genuinely engaging with these strategists.

This is more than sitting down to exchange ideas. You need to invite them to participate in a dialogue with you. Allow them to see your perspective and try on theirs. Make room for disagreement and elaboration. The conversation should be lively, authentic and fruitful.

Next comes intel gathering. You must probe for emergent trends in your business model, your industry and your customer base. This can be done by engaging with strategists, by conducting focus groups and customer surveys, or by building a resource pool from various sources, including but not limited to everyone we’ve already mentioned.

But there’s more in this environment. Other important sources to scour include the media, industry thought leaders and competitors. When we say media, we mean the popular press, news outlets and the internet. Seeking out thought leaders in your field is always a good idea. Likewise, study your competitors to see where they’re focusing their energy. Where are they investing? What precautions are they taking? Examine how they’re approaching the future.

You might create a table like this one to tie what you learn about trends from scanning the environment to the three focus areas discussed previously, and continue to add to it as you learn and develop new projects.

Download an editable version of the table here Environmental Factors.

As you note various trends, either on the far horizon or nearer to the present, begin to analyze and categorize them for a more informed understanding of what’s worthy of your attention. This will help you see patterns among the chaos.

Tag each trend with influencing factors, including the:

• Timeline to maturity: Is a trend manifesting even as you read this? Is it so soon that you need to prepare now? Or do you have time to prepare? Perhaps this is a trend that won’t begin to appear until much further down the road.
• Likelihood: How certain are you that a particular trend will emerge at all? Is its likelihood undeniable, very high, possible or unlikely? Note all trends accordingly so it’s easy to hone in on what demands your immediate attention.
• Secondary impacts: These are possible ways to leverage a combination of emerging trends. In what ways can you streamline efficiency and innovate to meet several goals at once?
• Key indicators: These are ways of gauging whether a trend is dissipating or reaching critical mass. In other words, look for signs that a trend is becoming more likely or less likely. For example, track whether a product drops below a certain price, indicating that it’s now become more widely accessible to all consumers.

Timeline, likelihood, secondary impacts and key indicators are the influences in your environment that interact with each other in myriad ways. Connect those dots to see further ahead and develop appropriate strategies to leverage them to your benefit. You may discover other relevant factors not on this list.

You’ve collected your intel; now you are ready to put your findings into action. This usually takes the form of a pilot program or a prototype. Use what you’ve learned to plan it out, design it, do a test run and watch how your market receives it.

You may want to try several of these projects with varying degrees of investment. This is where resource allocation is essential. Looking at the trends you’ve identified, what’s relevant now and how likely each is, you must decide how much time, money and labor you’re willing to dedicate. One trend may require nothing more than your time as you measure its approach, while another may invite you to set up an entire program with a team of volunteers and financial risks.

What you cannot forget is your own engagement with the process. You must actively engage with your pilot program or prototype as it’s developed and released into the market. As tactics succeed or fail, you must make adjustments in real time. Failing to do this can result in an attractive idea falling flat.

Now your pilot program or prototype has either evolved into a legitimate opportunity for your association, or you’re wondering what went wrong. It’s time to reconvene for an after-action review. Meet with your strategists, talk through what you thought would happen, what actually happened, and what you learned. Your goal is to accelerate your learning curve by fostering an intentional and real understanding of what needs to continue and what needs to change.

Part of this process involves investigating your return on investment (ROI). In this situation, there are two kinds of ROIs: quantitative returns and qualitative returns. A quantitative return is straightforward. Did you make money? Save money? Lose money? A qualitative return begs the question, if we didn’t earn anything, then what did we learn? Both ROIs are equally valuable, and neither should be neglected.