While the past four years have felt like they’ve had enough disruption to fill a decent lifetime, the universe never stops moving. 2024 is shaping up to be one filled with potential disruptions, in part because the US is entering into an already-contentious presidential election. With all this mind, many leaders may be wondering how to better organize their team to build a little foresight and thus, a little organizational preparedness for the next eighteen months.
To help with this, we have put together a rudimentary checklist any team can follow to put in place the ideas and practices that help to build and sustain foresight. Keep in mind that these are just basics. You can (and should) look at enhancing these steps to build out a robust strategic conversation. If you are just starting out with institutionalizing some formal foresight capacity, then we recommend taking these steps in the following order.
Set aside ten minutes each week for you and your team to share what they’ve seen or read that might be indicators of an important future development.
Build a picture of your operating environment.
Schedule an hour-and-a-half session to discuss key short vs. long-term trends.
Discuss the 7 – 10 most important generic contingencies.
Capture the above in a simple team reference document.
Simple, right? These rudiments are nothing fancy, and nothing terribly foreign to many informal conversations we have in the normal course of work. We’re just adding a tiny bit of structure and routine to things.
In the next few weeks, we will break down each of these items into a simple 3-step guide for getting them going.
If you’d like to accelerate the process, then reach out to us today to discuss how we can work with your team to build a robust strategic conversation.