Foresight excercises are complex and highly interactive processes. As stressed previously in the guide, there is no “one-single” way to organise an excercise. Although each individual excercise will have its own specific characteristics, they should all have in common the following: a good excercise starts with a deep understanding of the context in which it is embeeded and a clear set of objectives.
In what follows we split the organisation of the excercise in different phases. The reader should always keep in mind that these are logical, rather than chronological steps and feedback loops are present across all of them.
Feasibility assessment: in this phase the organisers evaluate whether a foresight excercise is appropriate given the context and whether it will be able to yeld valuable impacts on the system addressed.
Scoping the excercise: once the formal decisions to proceed has been taken, this is -broadly speaking- the design phase of the process, where the main structural decisions are discussed and taken.
Methodology: devising the methodology is effectively an element of the broader scoping phase. As methodological choices are crucial and complex they deserve deeper focus and a dedicated section.
Running the excercise: managing time, people, participants, communications and most importantly the learning process itself is at the core of the foresight excercise itself.
Follow up: Once the main tasks of the Foresight exercise have been completed, follow-up activities are required to ensure that the results are used effectively and all the knowledge acquired is shared.