A Three-Level Evaluation Process of Cultural Readiness for Strategic Foresight Projects

Abstract

A critical issue in Strategic Foresight approaches is the expected effect on the organizational and individual behavior change, as understanding, mapping, and influencing the desired future is a function of the group’s effort to adopt a more disruptive or conservative scenario in a long-term thinking and planning context. As a learning process, a Strategic Foresight experience, due to the nature of new knowledge co-creation, can foster mindset changes. However, at the same time, a Foresight project deals with the existing group assumptions due to national and organizational cultures, which can be more (or less) oriented to long-term or disruptive thinking, as well as the established managerial mentality about the future orientation in strategic thinking. These cultural assumptions can exert positive or negative influence in a Foresight mindset, and should be assessed and understood previously, as the overall cultural readiness can affect the performance of a Foresight project in general. Also, the analysis of the cultural aspect as an evaluation process can generate new learning, when compared a pre-assessment with a post-assessment. Thus, the posed question is, “How to assess cultural dimensions before and after Foresight projects?” Based on Hofstede National Cultural model, Cameron and Quinn Competing Values model, and Amsteus Managerial Foresight model, this article proposes to discuss the applicability of a three-level (national, organizational, and individual) evaluation process to assess the cultural environment readiness for Strategic Foresight projects and the influence of a Foresight project on participants’ perception of the future through a two-phase approach. This research contributes to Strategic Foresight methods by proposing a research agenda about the cultural perspective in Foresight assessment. Managerial contributions about the pre-assessment interpretations of the proposed three-level process to better understand the cultural profile of the participant group are also discussed in a hypothetical scenario application.