The Benefits of Strategic Foresight
Russell Harvey The Resilience Coach
I Support Leaders Who are Wading Through Treacle to Rediscover their Mojo in 6 Months.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this latest series of blogs looking at strategic foresight and its relevance to today’s business environment.
Strategic foresight is a systematic method of analysing possible futures to help businesses prepare for the future and make better decisions.
It involves considering a range of plausible futures, and then distilling them down to the most likely scenarios. Companies can then use this information to identify opportunities and challenges and align their strategies accordingly.
Steps including scenario planning and developing opportunity frameworks will give you the intelligence and market insights you need to develop your business and stand apart from your competitors in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world.
While many business leaders may consider it relatively easy to predict upcoming trends within their own field, foresight around what may eventuate in other sectors or the business landscape more generally, can be more challenging.
Strategic foresight enables organisations to build a proprietary view of the future to drive breakthrough innovation.
Looking ahead in a strategic way offers many tangible and intangible benefits to longer-range innovation efforts.
Here are some of the key benefits:
Innovation pipeline
Strategic foresight helps businesses fill and manage the innovation pipeline.
Understanding anticipated consumer/customer needs develops innovation ideas that are robust across a range of futures and differentiate your company from competitors.
External indicators can guide the ongoing development of innovation platforms to meet the market as it evolves at the right time with the right product.
Identify new markets
Strategic foresight solves some of the more intangible requirements of longer-term innovation - identifying markets that don’t yet exist, and ensuring that when innovations are ready to be commercialised, stakeholders are ready to manufacture, distribute and sell the products.
Increase chances of long-term success
Some innovations can take three to five years to develop, and during that time leadership changes and shifts in strategic direction can cause starts and stops to these research programmes.
Strategic foresight improves the odds that these programmes survive and thrive through these typical organisational transitions.
Improved decision-making
Organisations develop a more robust understanding of the future - enabling them to anticipate and prepare for potential challenges.
Anticipate future trends and disruptions
Organisations can position themselves better to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing environments.
Better identification of opportunities and threats
This helps organisations develop proactive strategies to address opportunities and threats - mitigating risks and maximising opportunities for growth and innovation.
If you need further information about these approaches, or any other resilience topic, please contact russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk.