See it before it happens
Almost every decision is made looking at the present. Anticipating is training your eye to read what is still barely a signal.
Foresight Workshops
The future is not guessed. It is explored, anticipated and built.
Imagining a possible future is the first step, not the last. The next is learning to analyze the present with method, anticipate scenarios and turn them into decisions. That is what these workshops work on.
- Three levels
- From primary school to organizations
- Method applied to real cases
Why
Anticipating can be learned.
At TacticRisk we work with strategic foresight for organizations that decide ten and twenty years out. Explaining the method again and again, we always notice the same thing: the hard part is not the tool, it is the habit of thinking about consequences before they happen.
That habit is trained, and it does not depend on age or rank. What changes is the language, the depth and the type of case; what does not change is the rigor of the method.
Hold several possibilities at once
There is no single future waiting. There are several, and working with all of them at once is what keeps you from being tied to a single plan.
Decide with the alternatives in view
Foresight does not try to guess which one will happen: it tries to make the whole range visible, so you choose knowing what you leave out.
The workshops
Three levels, one method.
Each workshop starts from where the group is and how far it can go. What is adjusted is the language and the type of case; the underlying logic —analyze the present, build scenarios, decide with the alternatives in view— is the same in all three.
Primary school
Future Explorers
Imagine, discover and build possible futures, by playing.
At this age the future usually appears as something that will simply happen: something you wait for, not something you decide. The workshop flips that idea. The future is not just one, and it does not come ready-made: it is built from what each person chooses to do.
It is done through play, with familiar situations —the neighborhood, the park, the school, the club— and without a single technical word. The goal is not to be right: it is to discover that each decision opens paths and closes others, and to dare to defend the one they chose.
Children in the second cycle of primary school, with their teachers and school leaders.
What you work on
- Separate three things that get confused: what is already happening, what could happen and what we would like to happen.
- Imagine several different futures for the same situation, and tell how you reach each one.
- Discover that every decision has an upside and a cost, and that there is no perfect option.
- Face surprises: things no one decided that change the board, as happens in real life.
- Choose a desired future for their own place and explain what should start being done today.
What you take away
- The idea, now experienced, that there is more than one possible future.
- Their own vocabulary to talk about it: trend, surprise, scenario, decision.
- A collective production with the future they chose for their school or neighborhood.
Secondary and university
Futures Lab
Analyze the present with method to anticipate scenarios.
Almost everyone has an opinion about the future. Very few have a method to build it. This workshop is the leap from one to the other: from opining about what will happen to analyzing it with tools that can be explained, discussed and applied again.
The core is telling trend from uncertainty —two things that get mixed up all the time— and learning to build scenarios that hold up. We do not look for the most likely future: we look for the range of plausible futures, which is what lets you decide with the alternatives in view.
Students in the upper cycle of secondary school and in university programs. Also teachers and departments who want to incorporate foresight into their curriculum.
What you work on
- Reading the present: hard data, weak signals and facts that carry the future.
- Trends and critical uncertainties: which ones truly move the system and which are noise.
- Structural analysis: which variables are drivers and which are barely dragged along by others.
- Actor game: who has power over what, who can block and who can ally.
- Building alternative scenarios that are coherent and defensible.
- From scenario to decision: what to start doing today, and what to keep open for now.
What you take away
- A replicable method, useful afterward for any topic: work, environment, technology, city, career.
- Their own set of scenarios, written and backed with arguments.
- Judgment to read news, reports and forecasts without buying certainties no one can have.
Public and private organizations
Applied Strategic Foresight
From uncertainty to strategy: anticipate to decide better.
Uncertainty is not eliminated. It is managed. This workshop takes a team from “we don’t know what will happen” to a strategy that withstands more than one future, working on a case of the organization’s own.
It is the same logic we use for foresight studies at TacticRisk, put in the team’s hands: structural analysis to understand what moves the system, an actor game to understand who can change it, and scenarios to test the strategy before committing to it.
Leadership, planning, risk-management and public-policy teams. Boards, councils and units that must commit to decisions several years out.
What you work on
- Define the system and the horizon: what is really being decided and until when.
- Identify key variables and their mutual influence through structural analysis.
- Map the actor game: interests, alliances, conflicts and real capacity to influence.
- Build scenarios and give them early signals, to recognize which one you are entering.
- Evaluate robust strategies: those that work reasonably across several scenarios, rather than the optimal one in a single scenario.
- Connect the exercise with present-day risk management, so it does not end up as a separate document.
What you take away
- A map of variables and actors from their own case, not a textbook example.
- A set of scenarios at the horizon they define, with early-warning indicators.
- A list of robust decisions and of decisions worth postponing until there is more information.
Which group would you like to run it with?
Tell us who they are and what they would like to be able to anticipate. With that we put together the proposal.
Dates, format and duration are arranged with each institution.
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