A Guide To Practical Foresight - 13. Managing change

Part 13 of a year long series on how to use Practical Foresight for competitive advantage:

Excitement
One thing is for sure! Almost everyone is interested in their future. Yet, organisations rarely use this fact to inspire their people to contribute to the success of their enterprise.

Studies show that inspiring people to think about their own futures, particular in terms of their work, is a rich source for discovering emerging change. People will engage and be inspired with creating better future if they believe that their leaders will enable appropriate responses.

A number of mechanisms are used by leading organisations to inspire, engage and enable people to spot and respond to change.

Engagement
Fully engaging people with the future and enabling them to properly consider the consequences of any actions they might take involves:

• Creating a clear vision of what the organisation is seeking to achieve in being a forward-thinking organisation
• Deciding the core values (culture) of what a forward-thinking organisation should aspire too
• Determining the measures of success
• Establishing processes to manage and measure progress
• Communicating the vision and progress towards achieving it continuously and honestly
• Educating everyone in how-to contribute, the rewards for success and consequences of failure to engage

Challenge
Organisations who are committed to enabling their people to shape the future use a variety of techniques:

• Everyone is asked to add new Insights and Trends to the central organisational database on a regular and quick to do basis
• Mechanisms are provided for people to share fresh Insights and Trends with their associates or keep material to themselves
• Aggregation of people's Insights and Trends provides dynamic and visual representations of 'what's important around here?'
• People are asked continuously to say how the future will be different and what to do about it
• Individuals and teams are encouraged to use the Insights and Trends databases before beginning their projects to widen horizons, find novel solutions and encourage creativity
• Newsletters and other communication mechanisms are used to keep people informed and encourage exploration

This guide serves as a documented description of how our clients, and others well known to us, achieve successful outcomes, avoid upcoming risk, innovate and thus create next practice through practical collaborative foresight.

You can read the full guide or contact us to learn how to improve Practical Foresight in your organisation.

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Latest Insights

We aim to alert you to upcoming changes from which you can explore issues of interest further. We offer a hand-picked selection of resources, reports and publications from commercial organisations, government agencies, NGOs, think-tanks and other public interest organizations.

Every week our members add many new insights to Shaping Tomorrow. By viewing the new insights you can anticipate how tomorrow will be different for you and your organisation. You can also add insights to create a personal database of emerging change. Read how to get the best out of Shaping Tomorrow in our free Practical Foresight guide (http://practicalforesight.wetpaint.com/ - separate registration required)

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Webinar: Protecting your organisation against future uncertainty

Thursday 19th March: 4.00-5.30 p.m (GMT)               Book your place now

In this webinar, one of the world’s leading experts in of horizon scanning, Dr Michael Jackson, and one of the world’s leading experts in advanced social computing, Professor Dave Snowden, will come together to explain how these two disciplines can work together to help organisations plan for the future and protect themselves against unexpected threats.

In this talking heads format, bringing to bear their experience of working with leading UK government ministries, your webinar leaders will present key examples of the use of horizon scanning combined with social computing in large organisations.

So, when the webinar has concluded, you will be able to take away several ideas for using horizon scanning with social computing technology in your own organisation to protect against future uncertainty and exploit upcoming opportunities.