Empowering Collaboration for Connecting Data, Information, and Insights to Foresight

Nobody in an organization knows exactly what will happen in the future. As such, what are ways that you and your leadership can prepare your organization for the nearly infinite array of future contexts, events, scenarios, and variables? As this session will illustrate, there are demonstrated, systematic ways in using data and information to reduce ambiguity in anticipating and preparing for what’s to come, and even better, to raising the likelihood that you and your organization will successfully engage it. Developing foresight capabilities is a widely applicable skillset that can benefit most every information professional. It permits them to collaborate with their organization's leaders in ways that leverages their contributions to their organization's decision-making, choice-making, action taking, planning and strategy development (DCAPS) activities.

We introduce the “sight-ladder”, a conceptual model that connects all the sight lines that use information between hindsight and foresight. We’ll show the vital need for information and intelligence professionals to configure their 4-Sets (i.e., mindsets, skillsets, toolsets & datasets) that permit the kind of collaboration and collective intelligence in which foresight is best achieved. Finally, we’ll share how connecting CI to foresight through collaboration engagement, both in project as well as ongoing modes, permits breakthrough insights about what will happen between the present and future. We will share how these are done practically in the context of health and medical research (HMR), and public service drawing on “real-world” illustrations that the authors have made contributions and have extensive experience in.