Once you’ve aligned with executive leaders and your core planning team, the next phase is critical: build a solid, shared understanding of your operating environment — external and internal. That means gathering insights from leadership and staff, customers/constituents, board members, partners, industry stakeholders and/or community representatives.
Two things matter most here:
- Who’s included. Have leadership confirm the participant list early. This builds ownership, confidence, and visible commitment.
- How you’ll engage them. Match the right methods to the right audiences so you get signal—not noise.
Choose fit-for-purpose methods and set expectations
Select a mix of approaches tailored to your context and culture:
- Executive and board working sessions or retreats
- Manager and staff workshops
- Targeted stakeholder surveys (online/offline)
- One-on-one leadership interviews
- Customer/constituent focus groups
- Expert panels or horizon scanning sprints
Your job as strategy lead is to co-design this with leadership: hear their aims, recommend the mix, lock decisions, and publish a simple plan (who, how, when, what outputs). The goal: leadership confidence that the process will produce the insight they need to set strategy.
Close the loop fast
Every engagement creates an expectation. Keep trust high by consolidating and sharing back captured input—on time, every time.
- Commit to a cadence. e.g., 48-hour synth notes → weekly rollups → finalized summaries.
- Make it skimmable. Introduce key themes, evidence, and implications to the full report via a one page “situation analysis” lead in.
- Show progress. What’s completed, what’s pending, what’s next.
Meeting these micro-deadlines acknowledges respect for participants’ time and keeps energy high. Miss them, and attention drifts.
Add foresight to beat the “single-future trap”
Environmental assessment shouldn’t stop at painting a picture of “today.” Layer in scenario-based planning to explore multiple plausible futures so you can sense, shape, and adapt as reality unfolds. Unlike forecasting (which often implies one “most likely” outcome), scenarios help you:
- Confront uncertainty without wishful thinking
- Identify cross-future capabilities you’ll need regardless of which future emerges
- Spot early indicators and pre-decide triggers for course corrections
This is how organizations avoid brittle plans and build strategic agility.
Put it together
When you combine inclusive assessment, disciplined communication, and scenario-based foresight, you strengthen your strategy information foundation and improve your ability to adjust—before weak signals become powerful surprises.
Learn the method, apply it right away
Mastering Foresight: Scenario-Based Planning Certification Program, offered in association with George Washington University’s Center for Excellence in Public Leadership, College of Professional Studies, and the Baldrige Foundation Institute for Performance Excellence, is a practical, hands-on program focused on the most widely used foresight tool: scenario-based planning.
What you’ll be able to do
- Lead and facilitate all phases of a scenario-based planning workshop
- Understand drivers of alternative futures and guide capability discussions
- Think strategically to spot opportunity amid uncertainty
- Align teams around the skill of “futuring” to boost agility
- Ensure planning priorities drive the right outcomes
- Bridge strategy and foresight to analyze many futures and set priorities
- Use an agile foresight system to guide decision-making
- Build a strategy-focused organization that considers how multiple futures could unfold