Foresight and Design: New Support for Strategic Decision Making

Abstract

Decision makers who plan, decide, and act to influence change need to rely on a new, emerging approach to the future in the increasingly turbulent environments they face today. After reviewing the evidence that the world has in fact changed, we introduce two emerging disciplines that have grown in response to those changes: strategic foresight as a complement to traditional, extrapolative forecasting, and strategic design as the systemic version of the more tactical product-service design. Neither replaces the traditional disciplines, but practitioners of each are able to contend with the fast moving, disruptive changes more common in this century than in the last. Both are valuable in themselves, but integrating them into design with foresight allows practitioners to handle both the changes to an organization coming from the world aka inbound change, and changes which an enterprise creates itself to influence the world, aka outbound change or strategy. Finally, we compare the results of a traditional study from the financial services industry with one using the integrated approach.

Keywords

• Strategic foresight
• Design thinking
• Strategic design
• Decision making
• Uncertainty