Seeing further, together
Thinking Forwards Together.
A day for leadership teams looking ahead together: foresight, scenarios, group forecasting and deliberation about the future you are building.
- Level
- Immerse
- Learning time
- 8 hours
- Where
- Complexity, decisions and innovation
- Price
- £249
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 planning for an uncertain future together
Overview
No leadership team can predict the future, but it can rehearse for several of them. Seeing further, together gives teams a shared way of looking ahead. It starts by clarifying what strategic thinking is and how to read the operating environment, then builds a practical foresight toolkit: scenario planning, PESTLE and environmental scanning, the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report and the Delphi Method for group forecasting. Friend and Hickling's Strategic Choice Approach, decisions under deep uncertainty, Heifetz's adaptive leadership and creative thinking tools help teams deliberate well, and a capstone on Dieselgate, Silicon Valley Bank and FTX tests the whole toolkit against real failure.
Aims
This programme aims to help leadership teams think about the future together rather than in silos, replacing false prediction with disciplined foresight. It develops the shared habits of scanning, scenario building, structured deliberation and honest risk reading that let a team make robust choices about the future it is building, even when the odds are unknown.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Distinguish forecasting from scenario planning and explain when each, and the Delphi Method, helps a team think about an uncertain future.
- Use environmental scanning, scenarios and structured strategic choice tools to build and test options with your leadership team.
- Lead deliberation about long-term risks and choices in a way that holds uncertainty, draws on every voice and ends in robust decisions.
What you'll develop
By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:
- Distinguish forecasting from scenario planning and identify a single forecast that is being presented as a scenario exercise.
- Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning, strategic management and strategic leadership, and apply the test of value and real choice to a strategy document.
- Distinguish the five Cynefin domains and describe the decision-making approach each one calls for.
- Distinguish certainty, risk, uncertainty and ambiguity, and use four questions to place a live decision on that spectrum.
- Explain Klein's recognition primed decision model and why expert recognition under pressure is not guesswork.
- 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.
- Analyse a real risk failure by identifying for yourself which frameworks apply and why.
Built from 7 parts.
8 hours of learning.
- 01Seeing round cornersScenario planning and strategic foresightBitesize · VUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity2 modules
- 02Seeing the bigger pictureStrategic thinking and environmental scanningBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 03Choices under uncertaintyStrategic choice models and decisions under riskBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 04Calm heads, clear callsNaturalistic decision making and Delphi methodBitesize · Solving Complex Problems and Decision Making2 modules
- 05Sparking fresh thinkingCreative thinking tools and techniquesBitesize · Creativity and Innovation1 module
- 06Scanning the EnvironmentStrategic Management1 module
- 07What lies over the horizonGlobal and emerging risk case studiesBitesize · Strategic Risk2 modules