4 Steps to the Future: A Quick and Clean Guide to Creating Foresight

This short book (only 79 pages, many of them worksheets) lays out the process for creating foresight—insight into how and why the future may be different. Foresight is a necessary precursor for any strategy plan, and, lucky you, you got stuck with this year's annual strategy planning session agenda creation.Here’s an overview of what you find inside:- Past: The Past section covers how to review a specific issue changes over previous years and the source of those changes (science & technology advancements, conflict or competition, new ideas & values, and chance). The goal is to recognize patterns and how they have led the company or industry to where it is now.- Present: Once the team has an agreed on a collective view of the past, the 4 Steps model moves us to the Present. In this section the author asks the team to look at historical drivers (the ones you outlined in the Past section) that might be at play today and whether these trends are increasing or decreasing, new sources of change that might mature into trends, counter trends, and stabilities that might slow or prevent change. 4 Steps presents several models of understanding emerging issues without belaboring any of them.- Futures: With an understanding of historical drivers and the state of the present, it’s time to turn our attention to the futures. Not a single future. The futures. There are many possible futures, as described in alternative scenarios. This chapter covers how to develop the scenarios using a particular framework and how to understand their implications.- Aspirations: The final step in the 4 Steps process asks the team to address the question, “What future do we want to see happen?” through the process of visioning.The book also provides a Glossary, a list of Additional Resources, and an Appendix of the worksheets used throughout.I recommend this book for anyone who is assigned or required to manage their team’s strategy planning or who has been asked to develop insight on a thorny issue on short notice. It is not for an experienced futurist or a strategy consultant looking for new methods. It is written for someone whose job requires foresight as raw material for their work but lacks resources (money, time) to hire an external firm to conduct the work. Anyone who complains about the book being “basic” or “for beginners only” missed the point.From the title, the summary, the author’s website and other reviews, what was ultimately delivered exceeded my expectations—a short, snappy and well-written guide to adding some structure to thinking about the future. I appreciated that this book was easy to read for the weary professional who needs to understand the process fast and have an agenda together for the boss by EOB—it took me under an hour to read. Any industry-specific words are explained or presented in the Glossary, the thoughts are well-organized, the sentences clear and the imagery supportive. The addition of worksheets to visually represent the author’s ideas was a bonus.The main thrust of the book is that thinking about the future is improved by thinking about the future systematically. By organizing the content in a simple structure—past, present, future, and aspirations—the author makes adding some structure to a company’s thought process seem more enticing and possible. You really do believe you could organize a two-day retreat, use this process as a guide and generate valuable insights with your team.By design 4 Steps is a high-level overview (and not a comprehensive guide) of the foresight development process, and thereby fulfills its purpose. I appreciate that the author set the parameters—to provide a “quick and clean guide”—and rigorously stuck to them. As someone who could have used this book when I was first asked to facilitate a team planning session, I appreciate the 40,000-foot approach. I wouldn’t have been able to use a more thorough examination, given my limited time, resources, and experience.If I have any criticisms of this book, it’s that it’s self-published. (FutureScribe is Vision Foresight Strategy’s "imprint", but this is their only book.) It’s obvious that this book can stand on its own as an excellent guide, so I'm not sure if they shopped it to publishers only to be told they lacked a platform or that it was too short or didn't fit into the Management category. However, VFS could use it as a “lead magnet” for their consulting services (and seemingly isn’t). It’s lacking some of the basics of digital marketing infrastructure that a Big 6 publisher likes to see in a mainstream business book, including a sizable platform (such as a blog or social media following). They are not quite there yet with the sales funnel, which means that anyone who is looking for assistance beyond the book has to be proactive and hunt down the company (not referenced) on their own. Also, for whatever reason, it only comes in paperback when an e-book version would be ideal. The marketer in me is chomping at the bit to get them sorted out, because this is a valuable book that should be on everyone's shelves, when so many of the business books with stellar marketing are utter dreck.However, I wholeheartedly recommend this book, especially if your boss just emailed you to ask you to take charge of the agenda for next week's planning session he forgot about. Order the book pronto and get to work.

First a word of how I come to know Richard and to review this book. I was on the faculty and the Director of the M.S. program in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston for 30 years. I retired from the University in 2013 and founded a nonprofit called Teach the Future to introduce futures thinking to schools and colleges around the world. As an academic futurist, I have known Richard a long time because he received his doctorate from Dr. Jim Dator at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Richard has been in business as a professional futurist since, doing business as Vision Foresight Strategy LLC. So he is academically prepared and has significant professional experience to write this great book.Four Steps to the Future is an eminently readable and useful approach to doing foresight and vision in today’s world. It’s also short at 57 pages, but it covers the essentials of the subject. Here is Richard’s description of the book.This book does not represent the entire range or depth of what can be done with foresight, but it will take you from A to Z, from having no clear, shared understanding of the future to having a new set of goals informed by critical thinking about your organization’s future. Mostly true, but I would not exactly say ‘A to Z’. There is some work that usually precedes Richard’s First Step and even more that follows the Fourth. So it’s more ‘E to P’ in my estimation. That said, Four Steps definitely captures the core of foresight and vision, and particularly those aspects which are different from forecasting and planning as they are practiced in most organizations.So on to the Four Steps:• Step 1, The Past – Gathering information about how we got to where we are today• Step 2, The Present – Assessing how much of that will continue to change the future and adding novel elements appearing today that could change the future• Step 3, The Future – Describing alternative plausible futures that arise from the forces catalogued in the Past and the Present along with their implications for organizational planning• Step 4, Aspiration – Identifying the preferred future expressed as the vision for a better futureSimple, straight-forward, and extremely well-done.Finally, while the book describes organizational foresight, it contains exercises and worksheets that could easily be used to introduce foresight to high school and college classes. That’s my interest, and where I hope that this book makes its greatest impact. Unless we start educating young people in how to anticipate and influence change at an early age, we will still be correcting their misimpressions and mistakes for decades to come.Congratulations, Richard!

If you have been reading in HBR about super forecasting and futures studies, but wondering what all the fuss is about, this book is for you. 4 Steps to the Future is a concise primer on the subject. Does your organization do strategic planning, budgets, and long term financial forecasts? If so, your organization is in the top 5% of companies who look for alignment and predictability. This will take you to the next level, evaluating potential futures that look out well beyond the horizon of your current planning and forecasting horizons, and connecting your short term plan to your 20-year vision and beyond.

This book was recommended to me by a leading academic futurist as a concise and practical guide to developing foresight in organizations. I had high expectations which were exceeded: It's not only concise and practical, but well written and filled with useful insights. The "4 Steps" process for creating foresight is applicable to all types of organizational settings. Despite the brevity of the book, it contains additional resources in the back, including links to digital copies of worksheets for group foresight exercises, a glossary, and key resources for those interested in digging deeper in futures studies. A small gem of a book!

As a fellow futurist and consultant to organizations, 4 Steps to the Future is the most clear, concise and applicable book on foresight that I have seen published to date. Most books on futures studies focus on methods, case studies, history of the field... what this book provides is a clear map to using the methods to achieve results in your organization. The exercises provided and the insights from years of practical experience are worth much more than the cost of this book. It's a must have for anyone who believes in the transformative power of foresight!

Klarer und präziser Text der eine ausgereifte Methode vorstellt mit dem man gut weiterarbeiten kann.

Quick read with all the essentials. No overly academic language and very clearly structure. Highly recommended.

An excellent text