How to get the best from this service

Hello and welcome. I'm here to help you shape your tomorrows by 'making better decisions today' through rapid adoption of new ideas and better mitigation of threats.

WHAT I DO HERE

I gather unstructured text from the Internet, not just numbers, in the form of Insights. Insights are articles, reports or PowerPoints that contain raw evidence of emerging change.

I then automatically extract verbatim Forecasts from the Insights without human intervention. Over the past four years, I've gathered more than two hundred and fifty thousand verbatim Forecasts covering political, economic, social and technological change from across the globe. I present these instantly in the form of this fully searchable and visualized database and make these available to you and our ten thousand+ members and seven thousand organizations.

I concentrate on future trends, uncertainties, and potential surprises, not on past trends, though I can extrapolate the latter. Most reported trends today lag the market. Using them is much like driving your car through the rear-view mirror. A trend is only a trend until it bends. Slavishly following past trends and driving till the road runs out means you are likely to take a route that others have already left with the danger that you will crash or die. Think the 2009 Global Financial Crisis, Newspapers, Kodak, Nokia, MySpace etc.

My job is to point out where the bends in the road will likely occur and to help you spot new opportunities and mitigate emerging risks before they hurt you and your organization.

Past trends also don't consider future uncertainties (like changes in the weather while driving) or surprises (like a potential road accident ahead). I consider these and help you develop scenarios and options to be more agile and resilient to future change regardless of what may happen. In other words, I'm your early-warning radar. I focus on the future and provide you with navigation information on what the road ahead looks like just when you need it. You can develop a collectively better mindset and better results rather than just engaging traditional trends researchers to tell you and all your rivals what just happened to result in you all fishing in the same pond. Rather, strategic foresight allows you to see ahead, innovate and mitigate forward risks to develop real competitive advantages that traditional trends researchers will report to the market much later.

WHAT YOU CAN DO HERE

To get the best use of our service our clients generally take one or more of these approaches:

First, they add their own sources to the existing eighteen thousand plus sources added by our clients, futurists and myself.

And then, they publish fast-produced, private newsletters, reports, audio files and PowerPoint presentations' in the form of Insights about the future and create Narrative forecasts and Chronologies on emerging change to regularly distribute to their stakeholders.

Clients set up private Challenges on interest topics key to them and have me create automatic weekly reports of the latest Forecasts. Most clients assign individual topics to their team and ask them to attend a thirty-minute weekly meeting to talk about what they learned each week. They cast their net wide enough to spot peripheral emerging opportunities and risks but narrow enough not to drown in too much information. With ten people in the conversation, this takes just twenty minutes. The remaining ten minutes is spent identifying new patterns, trends and uncertainties that everyone is just noticing, and an action plan developed to spread the word to other parts of their organization.

They also set up virtual or face-to-face facilitated workshops to determine their strategic response to the Forecasts that I have found using the systems comprehensive suite of best practice foresight, strategy and change management tools. This takes less than one day in a collaborative session, whereas traditional exercises take weeks and months and cost large amounts of money. I make no decisions but offer potential solutions gleaned from the Internet.

They conduct regular stakeholder surveys using best practice future questions to discover how the future might be different and work the responses into their strategic thinking.

Individually, or in teams, clients will take one new topic e.g. "Artificial intelligence" and apply the Forecasts to their sectoral interest e.g Energy, rather than search on "Artificial intelligence" AND Energy. This is a great way to innovate and mitigate risks, applying concepts from one topic to another in a safe environment. Our Options method is a good tool too to capture ideas here, with the subsequent ability to quickly prioritize best responses.

Clients conduct forward business and competitive intelligence exercises using my comprehensive collection of best practice Forecasts and strategic foresight methods.

Their site administrators act as a fast think tank and internal consultancy, providing futures research to any member of their organization that requires it and working with their associates to determine their strategic response.

Clients insist that every proposed strategy change contain a view of the future and an explanation of how the proposal will mitigate forward risks and make full use of emerging opportunities.

Clients also set up forums and groups, usually in private mode, to discuss the future implications of Insights or Forecasts and as part of their strategic foresight projects.

The most successful clients make foresight part of their vision and culture, practice, measure and communicate their progress continuously. They establish KPI's for their people based on the system's measurement of their contributions and encourage their stakeholders to be part of determining their destiny.

I'm also a digital coach, personal assistant, and online educator through my increasing chatbot and Ask Athena capabilities.

HOW TO START

People with little knowledge of strategic foresight can learn how to become a forward thinker without the need to first achieve an advanced degree over several years.

If your already strategic foresight savvy, then the best place to get started is by using my search field to explore your interest topic and open the top center panel buttons that will show you all I know on the topic.

But, if you are new to Foresight first read the Theory section or learn the site's Navigation principles by clicking the GUIDE button in the left-hand navigation bar and follow my suggestions to get started.

Do ask me if you need further help.

Cheers, Athena

How to get the best from this service

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