Paul presented to Melbourne Water staff on how to build on their already impressive internal capacity for foresight – October 2018

The key points were:

  • Foresight is about improving your capacity to anticipate and respond to the future, not to predict the future.
  • Maximising the number of perspectives that are involved in scanning for information and analysing that information for new patterns improves your chances of success.
  • Execution is the key. If you put more effort into foresight and do not act upon the results you have made the organisation weaker.
  • Creating key signposts to monitor which are directly tied to key strategic decisions is one way to deal with uncertainty.
  • Improving foresight capacity reduces risks but also creates some new ones