How to run a Foresight Sprint with your clients

You run Foresight Sprint workshops with your clients to help them gain insight on current trends in their business environment and look for opportunities that their company can seize. The purpose of the workshop is to help businesses understand key trends in their industry and imagine what direction they would take in a few years’ time. This way, they can proactively innovate, seize opportunities, and stay ahead of their competitors.

You can read more about why understanding and predicting trends is vital for businesses to thrive and survive here.

But how do we conduct these workshops to inspire our clients and help them achieve their goals?

Approaching the workshop

Like any other successful venture, preparation is key. It’s crucial to understand the specific goal or mission that the client wants to achieve through the workshop. Once the client’s intention is understood, we can align and fit the workshop domain to suit their desired goal.

With a clear intention, we start researching the domain that the client wishes to explore. The domain is the broad field of focus and interest that the trend workshop will target. It’s vital that the domain is set correctly, since it will impact every following aspect of the workshop. In addition, the explored domain and intention of the workshop needs to align with the company’s overall vision and mission. It’s our job to guide our clients through this so that they don’t stray from or lose sight of their mission.

Once the client’s goals and domain are established, we begin the insight and research stage. During this stage, we extensively research and identify opportunity patterns in trends, developments and forces within their domain. Using cultural triangulation — a methodology using a mixed method of quantitative, qualitative, and intuitive research tools and techniques — we begin looking into people’s behavior, motivations, and environment within a domain.

Our insights and findings are presented to the client in a research report and space poster.

• The research report is provided to clients well in advance of workshops so that all participants have the opportunity to go through the information, digest it, play around with it, or conduct their own additional research. This way, every participant in the trend workshop will be fully informed and educated.
• The opportunity patterns and discoveries in our research are bundled into what we call ‘spaces’. Spaces make our research visual, concrete and comprehensible for our clients. By formatting it into a poster, clients receive a visual, practical and tangible summary of the research report, which also outlines the format of the workshop.
• If applicable, we also provide additional visual materials such as mood boards or inspirational materials to the trend workshop.

A general outline of the elements included in a space poster:

1. What is the opportunity and a summary of the elements forming the specific space.
2. Details of underlying elements in the space, showing:
3. High-level new value propositions and business models.
4. Various drivers we found in our research, such as technological drivers or environment and context drivers (where economic, political, and legal drivers are summarized).
5. Client related information, such as client segments and typologies, diffusion of innovation in the space, and underlying social and behavioral drivers (values and needs).

How workshops are conducted

Research alone serves little purpose without proper action to follow it up. The workshop kicks off with introductions, an outline of the workshop and its focus domain, and reiterating the goal for holding the workshop.

Central to the workshop is the space poster and any other additional materials for each space, such as mood or inspirational boards. The workshop group is taken through each space poster and additional materials so that every participant is fully informed. The group is guided to assess the impact that the innovations on each space poster may have within its market space or their organization. Once all the spaces and assessments of each space’s impact has been covered, the real action begins.

Depending on the workshop’s mission or objective, they may be conducted with different formats. The two main formats we use are opportunity ideation or scenario planning.

In the opportunity ideation format, we help clients look for opportunities that their organization can seize based on trend research. To get the best out of all the different spaces in the workshop, we use a transversal format: everyone is asked to come up with opportunities based on all the information they have been given, rather than creating individual opportunities for each different poster.

1. We organize the different spaces and their additional materials into a gallery. Participants walk around the gallery in silence, assessing and taking in all the information.
2. Participants are asked to think of and write down possible opportunities that their company may take on sticky notes. Rather than presenting specific solutions, opportunities are a “How might we…?” formulation of high-level ideas and interesting chances their companies may consider taking.
3. The sticky notes are collected and arranged on a central board. A facilitator eliminates the doubles or opportunities that the company is already actively looking into. The new initiatives left on the board are briefly explained for clarification.
4. Participants, except those with deciding powers, are given dots they can add to the board to vote for the opportunities that they favor.
5. The results are arranged in hierarchy.
6. The deciding participants are then given one to three numbered dots, which they place on opportunities they would like to explore further. The numbered dots effectively rank their favored opportunities, with the first having the greatest priority.

In the scenario planning format, different possible future scenarios are established per space.

1. A gallery is organized after each space is presented and their impact is assessed.
2. Participants are given numbered voting dots and put a dot next to the drivers they think are the most important, uncertain and/or impactful in that space.
3. The facilitator ranks the top drivers by the number of votes.
4. These drivers serve the basis for three scenarios: a) Blue-sky scenario — the drivers play out favorably for the organization and are well-anticipated; b) Gray-sky scenario — not all the drivers play out favorably and the organization is unable to fully anticipate them. The organization may need to correct their course and reverse any impact; c) Dark-sky scenario — the drivers do not play out favorably for the organization and are unable to anticipate the change caused by these drivers. The impact is potentially severe and the organization will need to put strategic and operational efforts into managing the impact.

Post-workshop

After Foresight Sprint workshop conducted with an opportunity ideation format, the next step forward for clients would be to gather a team and organize a Design Sprint or Product/Venture Track, which will kickstart a project to pursue the favored opportunity.

For workshops held with a scenario planning format, the scenarios will need to be created through visual and storytelling techniques. Our tip is to create these different scenarios together with the workshop participants or the organization’s project owner. If time and budgets allow, we also recommend using a motion graphic to tell the story of the different scenarios.

All materials from the workshop should be handed over to the organization, including a digitalized version of the space posters. Further steps to pursue opportunities are enquired after and ideally followed up with a Design Sprint or Product/Venture Track. After an opportunity has been seized, encourage the client to follow up on the next best ideas generated during the workshop, as it enables them to bet on multiple opportunities.