Strategic Foresight as a Service

Scenarios are becoming more relevant to strategic planning to explore a variety of future pathways and connect them with existing insights and weak signals. However, the process is often biased by current assumptions, attitudes, and knowledge gaps, which can lead to unwanted lock-in effects and narrow-minded views of possible future developments. New creative and interdisciplinary methods such as story writing or reflective future thinking are used to continuously question existing beliefs and explore new ways beyond linear thinking. ​

Result and Value

Methods such as story writing strengthen reflective skills and enable the identification of strategic weaknesses early.

 https://www.futures4europe.eu/project/fod-stories-2050-49k2y

• Challenge existing assumptions, outcomes, and scenarios focused on a topic, among others, that could provide a new foundation for future communication and participative activities.
• Conduct horizon scanning beyond existing resources to identify wildcards and breakthrough factors and events.
• Using social media analysis for data mining.

• Using input from the initial research to generate the scope for each Futures Room.
• Involving expert and non-expert communities (such as science fiction writers, youth and sustainability networks) in researching various future projections/signposts and storylines.
• Involving professional writers to complete the stories.

• Creating multiple stories that encourage reflection on the topic.
• Create an interactive (online) Futures Map that includes all workshop outcomes leading to the final stories, as well as the corresponding pathways leading to each story.
• Making the Futures Map and stories available to the public.

Strategic Foresight and futures thinking are increasingly applied in policymaking, both on national as well as European level. The European Commission has therefore launched an initiative which aims to strengthen futures literacy and Foresight activities across Europe, and to connect and engage policymakers, Foresight practitioners, researchers and futurists with citizens to foster exchange and inclusion when approaching Europe’s future together. Part of this initiative is the Futures4Europe platform, designed to bring together these voices and offer a space for meaningful debate and engagement. 4strat was tasked with conceptualizing and designing this platform.

Result and Value

The Futures4Europe platform has doubled its members since its relaunch in May 2023. Around 30 new Foresight-related projects were added, and European citizens have been adding their futures stories continuously. The platform has grown into a space for finding information, inspiration and interaction in the field of Foresight and has been established as the forum for European Commission Foresight practitioners to follow the latest developments and research outputs contributed by platform members.

 https://www.futures4europe.eu

In a first step, we conducted a stakeholder analysis including persona development in order to identify the core needs of the platform. The concept layed out all central features, including a thematic structure in specially developed ‘futures themes’ as well as engagement and participation tools for platform members. The design and development of the platform followed the concept and its mission statement.

Creating spaces for the three core stakeholder groups 1) policymakers & researchers, 2) Foresight project teams and 3) the interested public, the platform brings together the different perspectives through an elaborate tagging system for all contents by which different content types, such as blog posts, projects and futures stories are connected to each other if they have a similar scope – regardless of whether they were contributed by an expert or a layman/laywoman.