IV. Foresight Practice Frameworks
Frameworks, also called SOPs (standard operating procedures) in industry, rubrics in academia, and recipes by cooks, are practice guidelines for professional work. This Guide uses 4U’s Eight Skills of Foresight Practice as our preferred general strategic foresight model and framework. We described that model and framework in Chapters 5 and 6, and we have grouped a diverse set of popular foresight methods by the Eight Skills.
Any model can be turned into framework when it is used as a set of guidelines to produce outcomes (research, education, publications, forecasts, models, advice), and when the outcomes of that work are measured and evaluated, with part of the evaluation being the consistency and correctness of application of the framework.
As with models there are no perfect frameworks, but knowing several good ones will make your work more consistent, your goals more conscious, and your processes more subject to formal evaluation and feedback. Here is a small sample of useful foresight frameworks to inspire you to go to the literature and find, adapt or build some of your own.
