What is Strategic Foresight?

Applying foresight to strategy development, perhaps the most dominant use of foresight today.

Definition

Strategic foresight might be the most commonly used term when it comes to thinking about how organisations use foresight. For me, the term means that our foresight capacities are being applied to strategy development to expand and deepen how we understand the range of possible organisational futures. A similar term is ‘corporate foresight’ which describes the context in which foresight is being used. Usage of this term is often confused and sometimes, strategic foresight is confused with Futures Studies itself, though this is not unusual in a field that has confused terminology as the norm.

Richard Slaughter defines strategic foresight as:

the ability to create and maintain a high-quality, coherent and functional forward view and to use the insights arising in organisationally useful ways; for example: to detect adverse conditions, guide policy, shape strategy; to explore new markets, products and services. It represents a fusion of futures methods with those of strategic mana…