Creative eyes on the horizon
Creative thinking, environmental scanning and emerging risks.
Three hours on creative eyes on the horizon: creative thinking and convergence tools, environmental scanning with PESTLE, the global risk landscape and a capstone on Dieselgate, Silicon Valley Bank and FTX.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 3 hours
- Where
- Complexity, decisions and innovation
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Leadership teams, strategy and risk leads in councils, the voluntary sector, health and housing
Overview
Scanning once a year produces a photograph when strategy needs a film, and the risks that matter most are often the quiet ones. Drawn from the Immerse Seeing further, together, this Focus opens with creative thinking tools, from de Bono's Six Thinking Hats and Osborn's rules of brainstorming to brainwriting and Buzan's mind mapping, with convergence tools so sessions end in decisions. It then turns to scanning through PESTLE's six lenses, giving each lens an owner, with Blockbuster in hindsight. It ends with the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report and its near and far horizons, and a capstone on Volkswagen's Dieselgate, Silicon Valley Bank and FTX.
Aims
This Focus exists to help teams look up, look out and look ahead: generating and choosing ideas with discipline, making environmental scanning a shared habit rather than an annual exercise, and keeping fast and slow risks clearly in view together.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Use creative thinking and convergence tools such as brainwriting and Six Thinking Hats to run sessions that end in decisions.
- Plan environmental scanning as a team habit, giving each PESTLE lens an owner and learning from Blockbuster in hindsight.
- Assess near and far horizon risks using the Global Risks Report, drawing on Dieselgate, Silicon Valley Bank and FTX.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Distinguish divergent from convergent thinking, and creative from critical thinking, and explain why judgement should be held back until the right moment.
- Explain why continuous scanning gives better strategic value than an annual snapshot taken before a strategy day.
- Describe the leading risks on the two year and ten year horizons and explain why their rankings differ.
- Analyse a real risk failure by identifying for yourself which frameworks apply and why.
- Apply generation techniques including the Six Thinking Hats, Osborn's four rules, SCAMPER, brainwriting 6-3-5 and mind mapping to a real service problem.
- Apply PESTLE's six lenses with named owners and judge the exercise by the decisions it changes rather than the grid it produces.
- Distinguish loud risk from quiet risk and explain how each tends to be missed.
- Identify the four patterns common to the Volkswagen, Silicon Valley Bank and FTX failures.
Built from 3 parts.
3 hours of learning.
- 01Sparking fresh thinkingCreative thinking tools and techniquesBitesize · Creativity and Innovation1 module
- 02Reading the wider landscapeEnvironmental scanning and corporate strategyBitesize · Strategic Management · module 31 module
- 03What lies over the horizonGlobal and emerging risk case studiesBitesize · Strategic Risk2 modules