Premium Class of Strategic Foresight

This training programme is aimed for all experts and executives in all kinds of organisations interested in both personal and organisational development with strategic foresight.

Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC) at the University of Turku provides Class participants with competence building solutions based on world-class scientific futures studies and foresight research. The Class offers participants high-level mastering of futures studies and foresight contents and methods that can be taken into practice in one’s organisation or in regional or thematic contexts. 

The world around us is complex, volatile, hyper-connected, surprising and ambiguous. Anticipating, creating, and managing change in our increasingly fast-paced and globalized technological world is a big challenge, but also a huge opportunity.

Understanding large-scale socioeconomic change, driving forces and – accordingly - reorganizing or transform social interaction and organisation practices are key talents of experts with various responsibility areas such as anticipatory governance, education and artificial general intelligence.

Strategic foresight allows us to learn about futures thinking with systemic and holistic perspectives. We learn how to outline complicated environments by e.g. mapping future developments, designing creative future images, and building visionary strategies. There is a proactive stakeholder perspective combined with agility in facing external change. Potential of humans as key facilitators of social transformation is essential.

The objective of the Premium Class of Strategic Foresight is to equip participants with tools and frameworks that help them tackle specific contextual development challenges and move foresight learning to concrete policy and actionable recommendations.

The participants learn how to apply dynamic and systematic strategic foresight practices by combining different methods and knowledge sources in order to meet specific needs (organisation, region or thematic field), including e.g. roadmaps and action plans.

After the Class, participants can develop their organisation strategy with futures consciousness, and they are able to solve specific foresight problems.

Specifically, participants learn to:

• design foresight activities and processes and to integrate them systematically to the strategy work of the organisation
• explore and to discover knowledge on interdisciplinary issues of strategic importance
• solve future-oriented challenges with a combination of futures studies methods and a foresight process with e.g. a definition of the target area, ways of acquiring data and knowledge and pooling results (implications)
• use methods that intensify innovation and empower human creativity, enabling the long-term success of action, e.g. the horizon scanning system and innovation methods.
   

The Class is delivered fully online and the total duration is 3,5 months. The maximum amount of participants in the group is 35.

The delivery combines synchronous Intensive Online Learning Sessions and Partner Team Excercises to be carried out according to personal schedule in between the online sessions.

Intensive Online Learning Sessions (IOLS)

• 8 sessions, 4 hours each. Total 32 hours
• synchronous, ensuring dialogue with participants
• focuses on partiipants' experiences and forsight challenges and opporunities facedin their professional field

Partner Team Exercices (PTE)

• A self.evaluation test and 2 exercices with supportive materials. Total 28 hours
• asynchronous, allowing the participants to plan their study schedule
• pre- and post-taskes of the thematic areas raised in the IOLS