What is foresight? What are its tools and mechanisms? Who uses foresight in the future, companies, or individuals? What are the stages of future foresight?
We will try to answer these questions in this article about the inevitability of looking to the future at all levels of individuals and institutions.
What is Foresight?
It is a misconception that a person thinks foresight is reading fortune-telling or astrology. On the contrary, we find that foresight is an attempt to explore available opportunities based on data that work to meet challenges and seize opportunities. Also, future foresight depends on strategic thinking and planning to look forward to the future.
What is Strategic Thinking?
- We find a close relationship between strategic thinking and future foresight. Thinking is a series of mental processes, analyzing, and linking them to come up with a clear vision.
- Strategic thinking is the deep contemplation of the future to determine the direction that leads the individual or organization to take advantage of the available opportunities or meet the expected challenges.
- Strategic planning relies on studying reality in all its dimensions of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, drawing visions and future targets, and coming up with practical programs that will move into the future.
From the above, it is clear that the close connection between the trilogy of future foresight, strategic thinking, and strategic planning and the understanding of such a triangle depends on each other.
What is the purpose of future foresight? And is future foresight specific to institutions or individuals?
It is worth mentioning that future foresight is a critical tool to ensure sustainability and empower individuals and institutions to face the changes in a rapidly changing world. Those who have not progressed are aging, and those who have not changed are changing. Therefore, we find that future foresight is not limited to institutions. Rather, we find that individuals are mainly concerned with it.
And we all practice planning, but with a different practice. Whoever wants to travel or make a trip chooses between a group of countries and a group of airlines, and then begins to plan the place of residence, expenses, visits, and leisure, and begin to develop alternatives in the event of an emergency how to overcome it, and this is planning; that is trying to read the future.
People use strategic foresight in its simplest form when buying a meal, gift, or leisure to see their footing and complete their careers. We find that organizations also use strategic foresight to see the future to achieve greater institutional competitiveness and further growth and development in a challenging market.
How to achieve strategic foresight?
The question now is how does an individual or organization achieve strategic foresight?
Strategic foresight is achieved through a set of mechanisms and necessary steps that enable the organization to gather information from reliable sources and link them to make strategic decisions regarding the future.
These reliable data and information help shape and formulate goals, thereby creating grand visions and generating short-term plans and strategies that contribute to sound and critical decision-making simultaneously.
Do we always have to look to the future?
Certainly, the basis is to work on foreseeing the future, but sometimes foreseeing the future means loss and non-achievement, so it is advisable to avoid foreseeing the future in the following cases:
- Inability to deal with the results, so it is necessary to implement and apply.
- Failure to identify beneficiaries and stakeholders.
- Lack of leadership that can operationalize strategies.
- The unavailability of necessary resources.
- Absence of objectives and their vagueness.
Future Foresight Tools
The ability to foresee the future does not depend on the reproduction of the past, but it depends mainly on the individuals' capability and institutions to explore problems and try to solve them in different ways for each era of its time and each future of its tools. Here, we touch on a set of tools to foresee the future.
The first tool "Track Your Life"
Track the course of your life through a graph of the curve of your life, in which you monitor your strengths and weaknesses, your successes and failures, your choices and imposed choices, and your decisions, and then begin to chart the course of your life and ask a set of questions:
- The result of strategic foresight?
- A source of pride?
- The most important lesson?
- What is your peak activity?
- Which events have a significant impact?
- The values that contributed to you?
- Learning methods?
- How to change your behavior over time?
- What have you learned and known about yourself?
The second tool "Reflecting on your journey"
One of the qualities of strategic leadership that depends on looking forward to the future of individuals or even organizations is its reliance on the self-assessment stage by tracking the progress and development of life, successes, and failures, and thinking long-term to correct the course constantly. This meditation benefits the leader or person in exploring the self on a personal level, and it benefits organizations in correcting the course of the organization. It also makes reviewing negative thought processes and unnecessary behaviors that hinder progress and development important in the stage of foreseeing the future.
The leader finds themselves in front of a set of calls between the call to adventure with the inevitability of change and taking decisive decisions that will change the path which you are new paths with different mechanisms to reach the desired goals or the call of fear and complacency to the current situation. The response to this call is a natural result of fear of change, and the desire not to commit to responsibilities and enter into a new challenge that will make a qualitative leap at the individual or corporate level.
Between the two calls, we find that the person needs, at this stage, an external voice that works to support them and reminds them of their successes and the sources of their strength to enter into a state of emotional challenge and acceptance of the other call. This source is the guide to achieve the first call, and the guide or external source may be cumulative experiences or a book they read or consulted from a loyal one.
As a natural result of external support, we find that the individual who was able to find a source of external support reaches the initial transit stage, which is decision-making, and even reaches the stage of the belly of the whale, which is the darkness of each other on top of each other, in which the adventure decision maker feels the great pressure they needed, and may feel suffocated, which leads them, of course, to relapse and return to the first box, which is the rejection of change.
Here is the biggest challenge facing the leader who sees themselves as a different person. Still, if they come out of this stage, they will emerge stronger than before and have gained a set of accumulated experiences that help them in one way or another to complete their march toward the goal.
Difficulties on the road, and after getting out of the darkness of the initial pressure, we will not find the road furnished with roses. Rather, it is full of problems and obstacles, successes and failures, the crisis produces crises. Here the individual needs a driving force that stabilizes and gives them hope and motivation to complete their journey on the road. Power may be an opportunity, an action, or a word from a friend that proves to them the change they chose or experiences for others before them.
Here, the change-maker and the aspirant for glory need to reconcile with themselves, get rid of the obstacles and failures of the path, learn from them, and work to avoid them in the future and escape forward; in the sense that there is no alternative to achieving glory, reaching the goal, and confronting all passive forces.
We must all remember that any leader in the stages of leadership and the brightness of star faced the stages of this journey, which are:
- The struggle of the two calls; the call of the adventurer and the one of retreat.
- Then they enter the darkness of the belly of the whale and its challenges and obstacles.
- Through the tunnel of adversity and difficulties and the ensuing crises.
- Until they find themselves in front of one road, which is the way to escape forward to achieve the supreme goal and look forward to the future.
- Only then will a leader who believes in themselves and their abilities reach the balance and reconciliation of the self to achieve their dreams and reach the future they foresight.
And so is the journey of life and the journey of the leader who believed in themselves and their abilities after believing in the Lord Almighty. There is nothing impossible in this life, as long as you can foresee the future and accept challenges.
In history, we have amazing stories of people who foresight the future and went from a bitter reality to an impressive and enlightening future. They did not have the potential or supernatural sources of habit. The most important source that anyone has in this life is their beliefs and convictions in themselves and that they can do the impossible, and what is the story of the bailiff who is far from us? They moved from a salesman of donkeys to the bailiff of Mansour and the rule of Andalusia, and other inspiring stories that give hope to everyone who wants to change the future to work hard and success will be their ally.
I will meet you in a continuation of this article on the future outlook for leaders, and we will talk about inspiring stories in the field of management and leadership that made history and left an imprint in this world.
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