Future practicesThis is a featured page

Managing uncertainty
Future Practice In a world where only uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity seem to be the norm these days, organizations need wider global knowledge obtained from many more external sources and a new set of cognitive skills to determine their best future responses.

The following critical cognitive skills need to be mastered:
  • trend assessment: the competency to understand trend directions, assess likely impacts, and respond in a timely and appropriate manner
  • pattern recognition: the ability to see patterns rather than individual factors
  • systems perspective: the capability to envision the entire system rather than the isolated components
  • anticipation: to anticipate short and long term consequences over time, novel situations, and geography
  • analysis and logic: to rely on a combination of analysis and logic rather than repeating the past and/or employing gut feel
Organizations that inspire, engage, and enable their people to use foresight in their daily work through developing their strategic competencies can acquire and maintain a sustainable futures-orientated edge in their global marketplace(s).


Next practice
Leading organizations use systematic, collaborative, and strategic foresight capabilities to discover what's coming next and respond ahead of the competitive curve.

Future Practices - Practical Foresight

They adopt a transdisciplinary, systems-science based approach to analysing patterns of change in the past, identifying trends of change in the present, and extrapolating alternative views of possible change in the future in order to help create the futures they desire.

These science based approaches span five main areas:
  • Trend assessment: open source, unstructured data collection and information monitoring
  • Pattern recognition: natural language and visualization discovery methods
  • Systems analysis: scenario planning and other methods create alternative contexts and understanding
  • Anticipatory planning: modelling of the desired/current state and gap identification
  • Instinct and logic: collaborative design of anticipatory understanding and response
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.


Further references
Next: Future Assumptions Back: Starting Futuring To: Shaping Tomorrow

Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.


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Keyword tags: Ambiguity Anticipation Change Complexity Foresight Futures Futures thinking Instinct Logic Pattern Perspective Strategy System Trends
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