NPC 2025 Session: Planning With Strategic Foresight   

The world is changing at an accelerated pace, and the future is more unknowable than ever before. Tech innovations, societal and political shifts, climate change, economic restructuring, and unknown ramifications from COVID-19 make it difficult to plan effectively. The path forward requires adjusting, adapting, and even reinventing planning processes, tools, and skills.

Futures literacy, “the skill that allows people to better understand the role that the future plays in what they see and do,” becomes ever more important in this fast-changing world. It entails the ability to imagine multiple plausible futures, use the future in our work, and plan with the future. In order to help communities navigate change now and later, planners need to understand how future uncertainties may affect the community, how to prepare for them, and how to pivot while the future is approaching. If you want to make the future a better place, learn to use strategic foresight in planning.

Learning Objectives:

• Use the future when planning for the future of communities
• Understand and utilize strategic foresight methods in planning
• Apply foresight methods as part of community engagement processes