Most foresight projects that disappoint were lost before the first workshop. Ten things to settle in the scoping conversation, and three ways it comes apart.
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The worst moment in a foresight project is the one where a group realises, somewhere past the midpoint, that it has been answering a question nobody needed answered. Everyone has been diligent. The scanning was good, the scenarios hold up, the workshops went well. And it is all pointing at a problem that turned out to belong to one person in the kick-off meeting who spoke with more conviction than anyone else in the room.
I have run and designed something over fifty of these projects now, from year-long strategy programmes down to single-day sessions, and the ones that went wrong almost always went wrong early. Usually in the first two conversations, before anyone had done any work worth the name.
There is a pragmatism problem sitting underneath this. Clients are under pressure to show movement, and scoping looks like the part you can compress. It is dull, it produces no artefacts anyone can circulate, and skipping it feels efficient right up to the point where it very much is not. What follows is what I now insist on covering before a project starts.
1. Find the real problem
The presenting question is often a symptom. "We need to understand the future of our sector" usually translates, after an hour of digging, into something far more specific and far more uncomfortable, a capability the organisation suspects is becoming obsolete, a market position nobody wants to say out loud is slipping, a succession question dressed as a strategy question.
Getting to that takes interviews, ideally one to one and ideally not with everyone in the same room. People say different things when their head of department is not listening. Stay open to reframing it later, because the real problem sometimes only surfaces once the scanning has started, though beginning with a sharp version saves an enormous amount of doubling back.
2. Name the decision and objectives it serve
This is the single question I would keep if I could only ask one. Which meeting does this work land in, and on what time horizons? A board session, a budget round, a portfolio review, a strategy refresh.
Without that, a foresight process drifts towards "let us see what we find", which produces interesting material and changes nothing. The evidence on this is not comfortable, since the best current research finds that internal foresight reliably improves strategic conversation inside firms without demonstrably changing what gets decided. If you want to land on the other side of that finding, the decision has to be named at the start, by someone who owns it.
3. Draw the boundaries
Which domains, which geographies, which time horizon. Too wide and the group drowns; too narrow and you miss the thing that was going to matter.
Clients sometimes read the boundary-setting as a loss, and it is worth saying plainly that a tight frame produces better material than an open one, which is counterintuitive and well supported. The horizon in particular is worth arguing about. Ten years is the default request and it is frequently the wrong answer, because it sits far enough out to feel safe and close enough to be governed by current assumptions.
4. Anticipate key themes
Go in knowing roughly what will come up. If new generations and liquid lifestyles are going to dominate the discussion for this group, you can have done the reading, found the signals, and be ready with something they have not seen.
Leave room for the ones nobody raised. Part of what a scan is for is giving a group permission to discuss the thing everyone has been avoiding, and that only works if you have gone looking for it beforehand rather than hoping it turns up.
5. Choose methods last
Methods follow from the problem, the people and the decision. Picking them first is how a process ends up serving a tool, which is why we assemble them per project in the scoping conversation and not at the proposal stage, when nobody knows enough yet.
At ANTICIPATE, we tailor tools to each project rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. The scoping process is the time to match the right methods to the right challenges, ensuring the process flows smoothly from start to finish.
6. Decide who is in the room, and when.
Wide early, narrower later. Early breadth generates perspectives and buy-in at the same time, and buy-in bought cheaply at the start costs a fortune to acquire at the end.
Not everyone needs to be in everything. Some people contribute well once and then want out, which is fine if you tell them that is the arrangement. Decision-makers need to be present at the points where something is actually being decided, and getting that attendance committed during scoping is easier than chasing it later. The harder question, of what to do when the people in the room do not want to be there, belongs to a different conversation.
7. Find out where people are starting from
Futures literacy varies enormously inside a single organisation, and the term is worth using precisely. Riel Miller's definition at UNESCO treats it as a capability, i.e. the skill of using the future for different purposes, rather than familiarity with a set of methods. Some teams have it and have never named it. Others have been through three foresight exercises and still experience the whole thing as a away-day.
Ask during scoping. It changes whether you open with something foundational or go straight into the complicated material, and getting it wrong in either direction wastes a session.
8. Inventory what already exists
Most organisations are sitting on more than they realise through market research, customer insight, a scan someone built two years ago and abandoned, a strategy document with implicit assumptions about the future nobody has examined. Building on that is faster than starting clean, and it has a political benefit too, since people are warmer towards a process that takes their existing work seriously.
9. Decide where you stand on the current strategy
Foresight can support an existing direction or interrogate it, and the two produce different projects. The uncomfortable version is worth naming during scoping rather than discovering in month four, because a process that was commissioned to validate and then starts questioning will run into trouble that has nothing to do with the quality of the work.
Even a supportive engagement should keep permission to test assumptions. Write that permission into the scope explicitly, so it is something agreed rather than something you have to claim later.
10. Agree what success looks like, knowing it is hard
This is the step most often skipped and the one I would defend hardest.
Foresight outcomes resist measurement. Much of the value shows up as a changed mind, a question somebody starts asking in meetings, a proposal that never gets made. Rohrbeck and Kum's longitudinal work found that firms strong in what they called future preparedness outperformed their industries years later, and the construct they measured was the quality and integration of the practice, not its existence. That is measurable at project level if you decide to.
Three things that work. Decision traceability, agreed up front: name the decision from step two and record, afterwards, whether the work touched it. A before-and-after read on the group's futures capability, which can be a short survey and does not need to be elaborate. And an honest list of the things you are choosing not to measure, which prevents the awkward conversation later where somebody asks for a number that was never going to exist.
Set these during scoping and make sure to follow-up along the way, also after the initial process is over.
Three ways it comes apart
Scope creep, which arrives disguised as enthusiasm
The requests to widen are usually made by people who are engaged and interested, which makes them hard to refuse. Revisit the agreed boundaries at each phase and treat the expansion as a separate conversation with its own budget.Buy-in assumed rather than built.
A sponsor's enthusiasm is not the organisation's. If the people who would have to act on the findings first encounter them in a final presentation, they will meet them as someone else's conclusions.Starting before the problem is clear.
The most expensive mistake available, and the most common, because every incentive in a client relationship points towards visible activity in week one. A scan pointed at the wrong question is worse than no scan, since it produces a confident answer that sends people in a direction they will take months to come back from.
This is the part that determines whether the interesting part is worth anything, which is a reasonable argument for giving it a fortnight and a proper conversation before anybody opens a spreadsheet.
Originally published in 2025, revised in October 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What does scoping a foresight project involve?
Settling, before work begins: the real problem beneath the presenting question, the specific decision the work has to serve, the domain and time boundaries, the themes likely to arise, the methods, who participates and at which stages, the group's existing futures capability, what data and prior work already exists, whether the project supports or interrogates current strategy, and how success will be judged.
Why do foresight projects fail?
Often because the question was wrong. Work begins before the real problem has been identified, often because a single confident voice framed it in the kick-off, and the error only surfaces past the midpoint. The other recurring causes are scope creep arriving as enthusiasm, and buy-in that was assumed from a sponsor rather than built across the people who would have to act.
How long should scoping take?
Proportionate to the project, and longer than clients expect. For a substantial programme, a round of one-to-one interviews and a dedicated scoping conversation before any scanning starts. The cost of compressing it is paid later, with interest, in work aimed at the wrong target.
How do you measure the success of a foresight project?
Three approaches that hold up. Decision traceability, where the specific decision the work was commissioned to serve is named at the outset and reviewed afterwards. A before-and-after read on the group's futures capability. And an explicit list of outcomes you are choosing not to measure. Rohrbeck and Kum's longitudinal research found that firms scoring high on future preparedness, i.e. the quality and integration of foresight practice, not merely its presence, outperformed their industries years later.
What is futures literacy?
A term developed by Riel Miller at UNESCO for the capability to use the future for different purposes and in different ways. It describes a skill people hold rather than a set of methods or a document, which is why assessing it during scoping changes how a process should be designed.
