Summary of the video

I'll start with the foresight part and I'll add the strategic.

it's part of a set of disciplines that we call future studies. When future studies in general is how do we think about the future and what does it mean for us?

So you will have elements of prospective psychology. How do human beings think about the future? For example we're very bad at predicting how we would react emotionally to events in the future. Mm-hmm. It's called affect forecasting. We're terrible at that. Okay. We also tend as humans to.

When you think about ourselves in the future, we don't really have a sense of continuity. We imagine ourselves in the future being really different. We achieve so many different things and we'll have this and that. And that is a psychological bias that almost a cognitive bias, let's say, that makes us do a lot of short term choices.

Cause we have such a disconnect with the future. Whereas if you look at businesses, they have a strong sense of continuity. It will remain the same. Okay. So our relationship with the future is not something that we learn in school. It's not something that our parents teach us. Mm-hmm. So at the heart of foresight and future studies is really the idea of long-term thinking and opening up the possibilities about the future and learning that takes a few cognitive adjustments.

Mm-hmm. Because by default you don't know how to do it when you need a few methods. Yeah. And I would say it takes a few years to really get a sense of, hmm, three years ago I imagined this, this is how the future played out. I wasn't so far there was completely wrong.

So becoming a futurist takes time.

It's not something out of nowhere. We, we just have a few methods, like a five step IDEO magic sauce. And then you are a designer. Being a a a futurist takes time.

Now the strategic part is how do you plug that way of thinking to a business in order to shape decisions? So how do you think about the future and then bring it back?

Cause if we wanna make a critique of strategic foresight, which is a discipline that a lot of people will encounter in sort of team building workshops, it's fun. They think about the future, throwing some technologies and imagine the future. But there is no. Structured framework to bring those insights back into the present and impact, what are we going to do tomorrow?

Yeah, okay. So that's the strategic part. And strategic foresight will be something that customers may request from an external partner that to guide them and walk them along that path. But I would say it should be a core business function within the strategic. Office a board, something that the company is doing on, on, on themselves, that's much better.

So a future shouldn't just be giving a fancy talk to kickstart a workshop or an offsite retreat at some time. A company should have that capability inside. It's much better. And That aspect of what do we do and when do we redo the exercise? Just start thinking, okay, how are things evolving?

Maybe at large just started the price of energy just might up the, we might have a terrible summer. We don't know.

So I would say Strategic Foresight will really help companies address the notion of change and how to behave and position yourself with the idea that the future will change, the future will be different, and how do we navigate that?