How to run a Workshop of HORIZON SCANNING

The IDEALIST project offers free workshops, seminars, and educational materials for SMEs seeking to enhance organisational resilience, foster growth, and drive innovation. Explore practical strategies for business model transformation, leveraging new technologies, and long-term planning. This page focuses on Horizon Scanning, providing valuable guidance for company managers, team leaders, and process facilitators on its implementation within your organisation.

Horizon Scanning Toolbox

This Toolbox is designed specifically for SMEs to enable them to identify emerging changes in the macroenvironment, anticipate their impacts for the future and build organisational competencies to deal with them. This Toolbox enhances specifically foresight competences and offers essential tools and methods to help SMEs organise their own sessions on strategic foresight.

More specifically, the toolbox translates the Horizon Scanning process into a workshop-based format aimed to identify and analyse potential disruptors affecting the future of any industrial ecosystem.

We invite you to engage in collaborative Horizon Scanning exercises, discuss signals of new, and learn how to use knowledge about potential futures in your present-day decision-making. 

 It is recommended that sessions follow the structure of the Horizon Scanning workshop outlined in the section below where you can find downloadable materials and guidelines to support you in the design and implementation of workshops in your organisational context. 

 All the materials are applicable to either on-site or an online workshop format.

Preparation

Before actually holding the workshop you should consider key practical components that will enable effective work. Define the key questions driving the rationale behind the planned exploration of the future. Clarify objectives of Horizon Scanning. Are you scanning the horizon for the whole company, one department or a specific subject area? Do you want to define the opportunities and threats to the organisation? Do you want to know what the discovered changes are likely to bring in the long term to your organisation? What impact will the changes have on the organisation today? Do you think about the impact in 2030 or rather 2040? 

Go through the structure of the Horizon Scanning translated into the workshop-based exercises and see if it is clear to you. Adapt the schedule so that it is suitable for the participants of the activity.  

Decide upon the format of the workshop (on-site or online) and prepare all the working templates for individual and group exercises accordingly. If you plan to run a physical workshop, print out all the templates and remember to bring sticky notes, marker pens, tape, scissors. You should also organise notepaper for all participants. If you plan to organise an online activity, you may use the model Miro board template available here 

➡️ CLICK HERE TO OPEN MIRO BOARD  

The contents are locked but after logging into the Miro environment you can copy the entire board by clicking the box with the title of the board, and then clicking duplicate, in the top left corner. The copied board will be saved to your Miro account in an editable version, which will immediately allow you to work with the whole workshop template. 

The detailed methodology is available here:  

Introduction to Foresight

The goal of this session is to familiarise participants with the key concepts used during the workshop.

Facilitators are invited to use the following materials:

Uncertainties & Drivers

The goal of this step of Horizon Scanning is to collect relevant information about the external environment of the topic under study. The collected information usually falls into three main categories: drivers, trends and signals of change. In this step, inputs are collected from participants regarding the most uncertain and vulnerable elements of the analysed business macro environment that have the most significant impact on its future. Rip van Winkle (RvW) is the recommended method at this stage.

Facilitators are invited to use the following materials:

Reporting-back

Plenary session to report back and discuss the results of the Rip van Winkle exercise followed by a brief introduction to the next phase of HS: Collecting Signals.

Collecting Signals

The goal of this phase is to “manually” scan relevant sources: websites, recent academic and popular press publications, social media feeds, in order to identify emerging issues (signals of new) on the topic under study. Each participant is requested to deliver a list of mapped signals for further, collective analysis.

Facilitators are invited to use the following materials:

Assessing & Mapping

The goal of this step is to analyse, organise and prioritise the findings of collecting signals’ phase. Participants are given three tasks. In the first task they are asked to describe collected signals in a template. In the second task participants are requested to assess each signal using two variables: impact & time. In the third task participants are requested to create maps of drivers of a topic under study.

Facilitators are invited to use the following materials:

Sense-Making

The aim of this step is to identify possible implications of the identified signals and brainstorm about recommendations for decision-making. Participants reflect upon the results of the previous stages and share ideas on how to best prepare for the future.

Facilitators are invited to use the following materials:

Reporting and Summary

Plenary session to report back and discuss the results of the Assessing the Signals and Maps of Drivers, as well as Sense-Making exercises followed by a Horizon Scanning results summary.

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