Rapid Foresight For Business Strategy and Innovation

Frame the domain to guide future foresight, defining scope, time horizon, and stakeholders via a domain brief and domain map.

Kick off your course project by framing the domain with a domain map, noting uncertainties, and defining scope; develop the focus issue and document it on the rapid four canvas.

Identify changes in the business environment, guided by expert insights and James, the constant, using scanning and futures research to sense shifts.

Scan the external environment to detect early signs of change across macro, industry, and transactional spheres. Build a holistic 360-degree view by monitoring social, economic, political, and technological trends.

Ethnographic features research uses ethnographic interviewing and scenario creation to explore people's perceptions, values, and biases about the future, guiding rapid foresight for business strategy.

Explore rapid foresight through an online scanning exercise, evaluating clipped items for normality, surprise, and future relevance; design scan cards and use Miro for remote collaboration.

Learn how to regularly scan and synthesize signals to sense changes, using Voice framework and clustering to identify trends, weak signals, and drivers shaping future business strategy.

Explore sensemaking and drivers of change through team scan clusters, capturing trends, assigning growth factors, and rating trend strength to imagine a plausible future with rapid foresight.

Explore how narrative storytelling drives strategic foresight by shaping future scenarios, engaging stakeholders, and enabling transformative change through fiction, diaries, news coverage, and historical narratives.

Choose a highly plausible scenario and develop a written future narrative—fiction, personal recollection, or art history—guided by the scenario card, detailing time horizon, outline, drivers, actors, and tangible futures.

Develop a few future customer personas for your course project by capturing beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors, then map their day-in-the-life across society, wellbeing, growth, and leisure.

Stress-test existing growth strategies with wind tunnel testing against future scenarios to identify future growth domains and opportunities through product, process, and business model innovations.

Explore building resilient growth strategies using the rapid foresight canvas to analyze future conditions, identify veto risks, prioritize growth themes, and develop product and service concepts with service blueprints.

Develop strategy by identifying required capabilities, people, and tools, define a viable business model, visualize value flow with a systems map, and create a present-to-future roadmap aligned with culture changes.

Lead like a futurist by facilitating futures conversations, building long-term thinking culture, enabling collaborative experimentation, and turning plausible scenarios into transformative action.

Apply the rapid foresight canvas to generate insights from weak signals and drivers of change, informing a plausible future view and strategy to win.