Shaping Tomorrow is an innovative online horizon scanning and foresight service designed to equip organizations with the strategic intelligence needed to navigate and shape the future. Here’s a comprehensive overview of what the product does and its key features:
Purpose and Functionality
Shaping Tomorrow is tailored for organizations seeking to understand and respond to the dynamic political, economic, social, and technological landscape. It helps policymakers, businesses, nonprofits, NGOs, and research institutions to inform policy, seize opportunities, mitigate threats, and enhance resilience to emerging changes.
Key Features
Horizon Scanning
The service utilizes an AI system named Athena, which continuously scans over 80,000 reputable internet and social media sources to identify emerging trends, weak signals of change, and potential wild cards. This process captures evidence of emerging change across various sectors, including financial services, manufacturing, defense & security, automotive, technology, utilities, and transport.
Scenario Planning
Shaping Tomorrow provides tools for scenario planning, allowing organizations to examine various scenarios to make informed assumptions about the future. This involves analyzing plausible, probable, and preferable futures using a full set of well-established strategic foresight tools.
Strategic Intelligence
The service offers strategic intelligence by providing insights into external forces driving widespread change. This enables medium to long-term planning and enhances organizational resilience. The intelligence is delivered through summaries and visualizations of possible future outcomes, which can be easily distributed and shared in dashboard, slide presentation, and Excel formats.
Collective Intelligence Approach
Shaping Tomorrow combines Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Intelligence (HI) to provide a unique collective intelligence approach. This blend ensures breadth of knowledge, speed, and collaborative thinking, significantly reducing project costs and increasing strategic thinking time.
Cost and Time Efficiency
The AI-driven approach dramatically reduces the time and cost associated with strategic foresight. Robust strategic foresight choices, policy, and strategy briefs that previously took weeks, months, or years can now be created extremely rapidly.
Summaries and Visualizations
Athena produces instant summaries and visualizations of future outcomes, facilitating easy distribution and sharing. These findings can be reviewed with a specialist team experienced in writing futures briefs, conducting research, and running participatory workshops.
Comprehensive Suite of Services
- Horizon Scanning: Capture evidence of emerging change.
- Analysis: Access plausible, probable, and preferable futures using established strategic foresight tools.
- Publishing: Share scan findings in slide or Excel format.
- Workshops: Participatory online and face-to-face workshops utilizing best practice strategic foresight, change management, and forward competitive intelligence methods.
- Surveys: Gather stakeholders’ views and opinions using pre-prepared foresight survey templates with auto-aggregation of results.
- Network Collaboration: Support and training covering all aspects of foresight, provided by the specialist team, comprehensive guides, and via a chatbot.
Project Management and Continuous Development
The service includes a built-in project management process that allows users to tailor specific briefs and conduct deep dives. It operates to Prince 2.0 standards, developing SMART objectives and milestones. The system boasts over 99.9% uptime and undergoes about 8 significant software upgrades per year, incorporating method upgrades and new techniques suggested by feedback from partners, clients, and members.
Global Reach and Recognition
Shaping Tomorrow, established in 2002 and headquartered in the UK, operates globally across all continents and in more than 30 countries. It serves over 20,000 members and partners and has received several unsolicited awards, including ‘Global Knowledge Platform’, ‘Technology Innovator Award’, and ‘International Gamechanger of the Year’ award.
In summary, Shaping Tomorrow is a powerful tool that leverages AI and human intelligence to provide organizations with the strategic foresight necessary to navigate and shape their future effectively. Its comprehensive suite of services, cost and time efficiency, and global reach make it an invaluable resource for various sectors.