Portfolio Foresight School
A four-hour in-house session with diffferent’s Portfolio Innovation, Foresight & Insights team, built around three questions they wanted an outside perspective on.
Challenge
The agency diffferent has a team dedicated to Portfolio Innovation, Foresight & Insights, and they have delivered a good number of foresight projects for clients. So the brief was to challenge an experienced practice rather than introduce one. What they wanted was an outside practitioner who would look at how they work and push on it.
Three questions were live for them. How do you scope a project when the client's interest in foresight is still fuzzy, and get to the real question and the right level of ambition? How much research, validation, participation and scenario development does a given decision actually call for, and where can the work be simplified while staying solid? And how do you make scenarios useful before the final workshop, so there is a real bridge into strategy, portfolio and innovation decisions?
AI ran underneath all three. Where does it improve foresight work, and where does it weaken it? Behind that sat the commercial question the team put to us directly: if every consultancy can reach similar AI capabilities and similar information, what makes diffferent different?
Approach
We designed the Portfolio Foresight School as a facilitated peer review of real foresight practice. Our own cases and tools gave the conversation structure and contrast, while the discussion itself carried the session.
1) A point of view to work from
We opened with News from the Futures, which brought the group into a future moment together before any framework appeared. From there we set out the ANTICIPATE view: four principles of futures work covering imagination, futures thinking, uncertainty and agency, and the ACT Foresight Framework as our theory of change. Then we put the three questions on the wall as the map for the session.
2) Scope: how do we frame it
We worked through what shapes a foresight project before any method is chosen. That covered the criteria for a strong focal question, a double diamond view of scoping that reaches past the brief into purpose, audience, politics, resources and culture, and our ten-point scoping checklist, from mandate and decision rights through to embedding.
A four-quadrant map of stakeholder resistance gave them a way to read who needs to believe in the work and when. The team then took one of their own briefs back to the first client conversation and worked through what they would want to understand before proposing anything.
3) Design: how do we make it robust enough
This was the heart of the session. We set a full nine-month scenario process for a Danish insurer against lighter formats, and asked what the rigour bought and which parts the client's decisions actually required.
The group looked at a range of options, from stress-testing with drivers, through scenario archetypes and rapid scenarios, to fully researched and validated ones, with the point being that each supports different claims. We then talked through what they would keep, cut or do differently if one of their own projects had to run on half the time and half the budget.
AI entered here through research on a corporate foresight function that ran the same process human-led and then AI-augmented, and through our three modes of AI-assisted, AI-augmented and AI-automated foresight. The differentiation question closed the section.
4) Transform: how do we make it matter
We started from the fracture point the team knew well, where months of scenario work meet a single day of deciding what it all means. Our answer was to bring the futures forward, letting decision-makers meet provisional scenarios, fragments, personas and artefacts while the work is still being built.
We showed a menu of routes from scenarios into decisions, including windtunnelling, backcasting and roadmapping, futures personas and future news, artefacts and futurecrafting, opportunity mapping and visioning. The discussion turned on choosing the bridge that fits the client's decision, whether that is a portfolio call, a search for growth opportunities or alignment across an organisation.
5) A synthesis to take into their engagements
We closed by pulling the session into four questions that follow the arc of an engagement: before we propose, what are we actually solving? Before we design, what level of foresight is enough? During delivery, are we building usefulness and ownership as we go? And before we close, what will happen because of this work?
Outcomes
A four-stage check for their own projects
The closing synthesis gave the team a simple structure for reviewing an engagement from first client conversation through to handover, with the substance drawn from the discussions across the session.Language for proportionality
"Robust enough" gave the team a way to talk about rigour as a design choice tied to the decision at hand, which also helps them explain lighter formats to clients with confidence.A clearer route from scenarios into decisions
Bringing the futures forward, and choosing the bridge that matches the client's decision, gave them practical ways to close the gap between analysis and action.A position on AI
The session drew a line between what can be delegated to AI in scanning, synthesis and drafting, and what stays human: framing, interpretation, judgement and accountability. That line doubles as an answer to what differentiates them.Momentum in their own approach
The team reported afterwards that the discussions are feeding directly into how they are shaping their approach.
Testimonial
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Learn how to work with futures and foresight through our ANTICIPATE Academy!
Learn how to work with futures and foresight through our ANTICIPATE Academy!
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