Briefing Paper: Future Insight – Responding to Trends, Threats and Opportunities

As the pace of change in the world continues to accelerate, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict and plan for the future. The capacity of our organisations to forecast with accuracy has become much more limited.

This Briefing Paper provides valuable insights on HR’s role in developing foresight and organisation capabilities around vigilance, future sensing, environment scanning, and agile decision making.

Topics covered include:

• How processes for developing corporate strategy, identifying and testing strategic options need to change
• The dangers of complacency
• HR’s role in developing organisational capabilities for sensing and responding to threats and opportunities
• The role of leader selection and leadership development in fostering the mindsets and capabilities of leaders, and how leadership behaviours determine how much attention the organisation pays to what is happening externally
• HR’s role in developing organisation culture that encourages divergent thinking, with leaders prepared to hear uncomfortable messages about what is really going on externally
• Designing an organisation that has effective mechanisms for testing ideas and allowing unfiltered information to reach decision makers
• HR’s role in developing foresight around key talent and social trends, and being alert to external trends that may impact the execution of organisational strategy.