Use strategic foresight to enhance long-term organisational and societal resilience
Overview
This standard is about the use of strategic foresight to inform strategy, investment and resilience over time. It focusses on long-term uncertainty, emerging risk, systemic interdependencies, scenario planning, and adaptation.
It includes collaborating at a senior executive level, to anticipate, assess and plan for joint risks recognising that joint strategic objectives will need to be agreed, focussing on collective outcomes rather than single organisational objectives.
It involves not just predicting the future based on past trends but also identifying and analysing future trends to model patterns of change, identify weak signals of disruption, and develop adaptive decision architectures.
Adaptive decision architectures are frameworks that help organisations make decisions in a flexible, responsive, and evolving way, especially when the future is uncertain or changing fast. It supports organisations or places to remain viable and relevant over a 10-to-25-year horizon, regardless of which version of the future unfolds.
This standard is for individuals operating at a strategic level. It applies, but is not limited to, Chief Resilience Officers, Liaison Officers, Local Resilience Forum Chairs, Strategic Coordinating Groups Chairs, Chief Executives, Chief Operating Officers, Strategic Directors, Senior Resilience Practitioners and Accountable Emergency Officers.
Performance criteria
You must be able to:
1.evaluate and analyse legislation, statutory duties, codes of practice and guidance to identify responsibilities, contextual limitations, priorities and strategic approaches
2.identify the senior leaders, partners, stakeholders, and communities, including voluntary, community, and faith sector organisations, with whom to engage.
3,.apply strategic foresight to asset condition trajectories as a signal of future acute risk.
4.establish and maintain team environments that encourage open communication, challenge institutional assumptions, and reduce bias in decision-making.
5.collaborate strategically with senior leaders, partners, stakeholders, relevant communities and voluntary, community, and faith sector organisations to define and agree shared outcomes to deliver coordinated and effective responses.
6.review organisational strategies to identify opportunities for long-term renewal and improvement arising from disruptive changes.
7.contribute to development of a strategic foresight framework that incorporates political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental drivers of change
8.shape and sustain a foresight ecosystem that promotes situational awareness, joint understanding and system wide resilience thinking
9.lead the identification and interpretation of weak signals, emerging risks and disruptive trends that precede significant global or local shifts.
10.direct scenario planning processes to develop a range of probable, plausible and possible future scenarios that inform joint strategy and decision making
11.stress test organisational plans, systems and investment decisions against extreme, uncertain and non-linear future conditions and ensure mechanisms are in place to address learning identified
12.use methodologies to confirm actionable intelligence and the processes by which this is confirmed
13.lead adaptive decision-making that preserves strategic flexibility and identifies justified actions.
14.challenge assumptions and biases, within the senior leadership team.
15.communicate complex future risks and opportunities using shared language and compelling narratives to support joint understanding and influence decision making
16.undertake continuing professional development and share evidence based good and innovative practice in this occupational area
Knowledge and Understanding
You need to know and understand:
1.legislation, policies, guidance and good practice to apply strategic foresight to enhance long-term organisational and societal resilience
2.the frameworks of opportunity-seeking resilience and strategic renewal, including how to critically assess the ongoing relevance of business or operating models and use disruptive shifts to drive post-crisis regeneration and economic growth.
3.how to use international evidence and networks as a primary foresight input.
4.how to distinguish asset condition trajectory from maintenance planning input.
5.how to identify and work with senior leaders, partners, stakeholders and relevant communities to look ahead at different ways the future could develop to inform current decisions and long-term planning
6.the importance of looking at multiple possible futures rather than a single trend, and how to use this insight to guide current organisational decisions.
7.how to apply environmental scanning tools to identify and understand wide political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental drivers of change.
8.methodologies to confirm actionable intelligence and the process by which this is confirmed
9.how to facilitate scenario visioning and the development of coherent future narratives.
10.how to design and apply strategic stress tests to assess how organisational and systems perform in extreme or uncertain conditions
11.the concept of cognitive readiness and how to manage the mental challenges of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
12.the impact of group-think and bias on decision making and strategies to challenge these within leadership and partnership settings
13.how to create organisational cultures that support open challenge, minimise groupthink, and manage uncertainty during high-pressure events.
14.the role of reflective practice in evaluating performance, identifying areas for improvement and professional development