Collaborative Foresight for Teams

“It’s like team therapy”

Collaborative Foresight for Teams is a workshop in which teams gain futures-focused insights about their work, and ways to bring them into action.

The process helps the team to reveal new perspectives and opportunities and to align on how to work with the future going forward. It also helps the team to create a shared language around the future and builds their competencies in foresight and futures thinking.

The half-day workshop has four steps in which the participating team uncovers possible, desirable and unknown futures relevant to their topic at focus, key impacts and actions for the team to take.

To learn more about the process and get help facilitating a workshop, reach out to our Foresight Lead, Reeta Hafner.

Playbook - Collaborative Foresight for Teams

With the Collaborative Foresight for Teams playbook, we wish to offer a way for teams and organisations to apply Collaborative Foresight in their work and gain futures-oriented insights to inform action. The playbook includes a step-by-step guide to facilitating a half-day workshop during which the participating team uncovers possible, desirable and unknown futures relevant to their focus and selects key impacts and actions for the team to take.

Resources for hosting a workshop	File format
Canvas	.pdf
One-Pager for Defining the Focus	.docx
Time Travel Exercise	.docx
Presentation Slides for Hosting the Workshop	.pptx

The Process

The process builds on Media Evolution’s Collaborative Foresight approach and makes use of the wide range of future scenarios imagined by groups of professionals in our past Collaborative Foresight cycles.

In the workshop, the teams move through the following steps capturing their insights and actions into the Imagination-Action Gap canvas:

Team Focus
Before the workshop, the team defines what they want to focus on. This can be a product, theme, strategy, service or similar. Six questions guide the team in writing a one-pager to describe the context, purpose, current status and potential actions for the focus of the workshop.

Possible Futures
In this step, the team scans for signals and trends shaping the future of their focus. The team discusses the potential impacts of these developments and selects the most impactful and uncertain ones to explore further. From here, the team digs deeper into the possible impacts of these developments on their focus. The result is a cloud of signals and trends, and how they impact the team’s focus.

Desirable Futures
In this step, the team moves from observations to envisioning. The team is invited to a Time Travel exercise created to expand the horizon and reflect on the participants’ relationship to the past, present and the future with focus on the fruits of their work in the decades ahead. The result is a set of visions and what the possible impacts for the focus could be.

Unknown Futures
This step takes us into the unknown – into the futures that the team has not yet visited. The team members read future scenarios created in our Collaborative Foresight cycles to reflect on the impact of these futures and unknown futures in general on their focus and work. The result is reflections on what impact unknown scenarios might have on the team’s focus and how the team can continue to work with the unknown going forward.

Team Roadmap
This is where the bridge in Bridging Imagination-Action Gap takes shape. The team selects the most important insights that they need to address going forward and decides on actions and responsibilities. The result is a roadmap of actions for the team to take on key insights from the workshop.

How to credit this work?

The Collaborative Foresight for Teams - a workshop to bridge the imagination-action gap is licensed under the Creative Commons license: Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Acknowledgements

This method was developed with financial support from Swedbanks Ägarstiftelse Skåne and with time spent by teams from Ikea, Duni, The Bacon Hospital, and Joy.