Strategic Foresight
The most comprehensive strategic-foresight course available: not one school's toolkit, but the whole field. You will learn to see the future through its competing traditions — the Anglo intuitive-logics scenario school (Kahn, Wack, Shell, Schwartz), the French La Prospective (Godet's morphological, MICMAC and Mactor methods), the American probabilistic and institutional school (RAND Delphi, framework foresight, Tetlock's superforecasting), the net-assessment and war-gaming tradition (Andrew Marshall), the Chinese strategic tradition (shi, comprehensive national power, meta-synthesis, and the 'great changes unseen in a century' doctrine), and the critical and decolonial futures movement (Inayatullah's Causal Layered Analysis, Dator, futures literacy). Then the shared toolkit — horizon scanning, weak signals, Three Horizons, scenario building, backcasting — the structural and geopolitical lens (structural power, weaponised interdependence, chokepoint mapping), and intelligence-grade calibration (Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, ICD 203 standards, reference-class forecasting, a real predictions scorecard). Worked examples mix DSI's own published foresight with the external canon, and the capstone runs a full foresight cycle on your own question. For strategists, analysts, policy and business leaders, and intelligence practitioners.
Modules
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Why Foresight, and What It Is Not
Strategic foresight is often confused with prediction, and that confusion wastes the whole discipline. This module sets the foundation: the future is plural, not singular; foresight studies plausible futures rather than forecasting one; and its value is measured not by whether it calls the outcome but by whether it changes decisions today. It draws the line between forecasting, exploratory scenarios and normative backcasting, examines why capable organisations stay blind to change they could see, and closes with the foresight cycle that the rest of the course follows.
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Cosmologies of the Future
Before anyone reaches for a scenario grid or a forecast, they have already assumed something about time itself. Is the future a line that climbs, a wheel that turns, or a web of obligations to the unborn? This module treats those assumptions as cosmologies of the future, and argues that the image of time a strategist carries silently decides which methods feel natural and which futures stay invisible. It sets the cross-cultural foundation for the whole course, reading the Western linear image against Chinese cyclical and positional thinking, Indigenous and African relational futures, and the politics of whose future gets to count.
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The Anglo Intuitive-Logics School
The dominant Western approach to scenario planning grew out of the Cold War and matured inside a single oil company. This module traces the intuitive-logics tradition from Herman Kahn's disciplined imagination about nuclear war, through Pierre Wack's work at Shell that let the firm see the 1973 oil shock as plausible, to Kees van der Heijden's account of scenarios as a strategic conversation and Peter Schwartz's popular 2x2 method. It closes by weighing the school's strengths as a narrative craft against the blind spots that later drove analysts toward more formal methods, and shows how DSI writes intuitive-logics-style narrative futures grounded in named incidents.
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The French La Prospective School
La prospective is the French tradition of thinking about the future, distinct in temperament and method from Anglo-American forecasting. Where forecasting projects trends, prospective insists the future is not written: it is built by the will and conflict of actors. This module walks its lineage from the philosophers Gaston Berger and Bertrand de Jouvenel to the toolbox Michel Godet built at CNAM, morphological analysis, MICMAC structural analysis and the Mactor game of actors, and it reads DSI's own 'Laundered Dependency' analysis through that actor-centred lens. It closes by contrasting this formal, auditable, systems-based school with the narrative 'intuitive logics' scenario tradition, and asks when each is the right instrument.
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The American Probabilistic and Institutional School
The dominant tradition of foresight in the United States grew out of Cold War military planning and matured into a set of disciplined, quasi-quantitative methods for reasoning about the future. This module traces its lineage from RAND's Delphi technique, through the Houston school's Framework Foresight and Jerome Glenn's Futures Wheel, to the Institute for the Future's signal-driven forecasting, and finally to Philip Tetlock's work on calibrated probability judgement. The through-line is a conviction that estimates about the future can be structured, made explicit, scored and improved, a conviction DSI shares and practises through its own published Predictions Scorecard.
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Net Assessment and War-Gaming
Foresight is not only about scanning the horizon; it is about diagnosing a contest and stress-testing your own view of it. This module treats four adversarial disciplines as a family: net assessment, which frames the long-term competition rather than predicting its winner; red-teaming, which challenges the house view before an adversary does; war-gaming, which surfaces the second-order moves a static forecast misses; and prediction markets, which price dispersed belief into a probability. It draws on Andrew Marshall's Office of Net Assessment, Micah Zenko's study of red teams, the classical war-gaming tradition, and market experiments such as the Iowa Electronic Markets, and closes by turning simulation insight into robust, antifragile strategy.
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The Chinese Strategic-Foresight Tradition
China does foresight differently. Where much Western planning imagines the future as a set of discrete events to forecast, an older and continuing Chinese tradition treats the future as a propensity already latent in the present, to be sensed and shaped rather than predicted. This module traces that tradition from Sun Tzu's idea of shi, through the quantitative modelling of comprehensive national power and Qian Xuesen's meta-synthesis, to the living state doctrines of the period of strategic opportunity and the great changes unseen in a century. The aim is not to admire or to alarm, but to help an analyst read a rival's own foresight on its own terms.
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The Critical and Decolonial School
The dominant image of foresight is predictive: forecast the trend, size the market, name the year. The critical and decolonial school rejects that image. Foresight here is not about getting the future right but about surfacing the assumptions, discourses and power arrangements that make some futures thinkable and others unthinkable. This module works through the school's central instruments, Sohail Inayatullah's causal layered analysis, poststructural critique after Foucault, Jim Dator's four generic futures, and Riel Miller and UNESCO's futures literacy, and closes on the contest over whose futures are centred and whose are erased. Throughout it applies the tradition to concrete cases, including a worked reading of the sovereign-cloud debate, so that critique becomes a working method rather than a posture.
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Sensing and Framing
Foresight begins long before anyone forecasts anything. It begins with two disciplines that decide whether the whole cycle is worth running: how the question is framed, and how the environment is sensed. This module treats framing as the act that sets the decision, the time horizon and the system boundary; and sensing as the structured scanning that turns a noisy environment into ordered signals. It draws on STEEP scanning, Graham Molitor's emerging-issues analysis and Bill Sharpe's Three Horizons, alongside how DSI Advisory catches weak signals early. The aim is not a technique to memorise but a judgement to develop: what to look at, and why.
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Building Alternative Futures
The single greatest error in strategic foresight is to forecast one future and plan for it alone. This module equips the analyst to build sets of alternative futures instead. It works through the main scenario methods in current practice: the archetype set that reduces bias by design, the deductive two-by-two that dominates corporate and government planning, the inductive and branching methods that grow scenarios from signals, the normative approach that starts from a preferred end state and works backwards, and the cross-impact and morphological techniques that bridge toward the formal French methods. Throughout, the aim is not to predict but to widen the space of what a decision-maker takes seriously.
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Structural and Geopolitical Foresight
Most forecasting watches the pieces move. Structural foresight watches the board. This module equips strategists, analysts and policy staff to read the durable architecture of world power, the arrangement of security, production, finance and knowledge that decides which futures are even possible before any actor chooses. It builds from Susan Strange's structural power, through Farrell and Newman's account of weaponised interdependence, into the mapping methods DSI uses to locate chokepoints and dependencies. It closes on technology and regulation as forcing functions whose direction can be read years ahead. The stance is structural and non-partisan: explain outcomes by the shape of the board, not by the virtue of any player.
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Judgement, Calibration and Tradecraft
Foresight lives or dies on the quality of the judgement behind it. This module examines why unaided expert judgement about the future is systematically unreliable, and what disciplines exist to correct for it. It moves from the psychology of prediction through structured analytic techniques, the US Intelligence Community's analytic standards, reference-class forecasting, and the accountability that comes from scoring forecasts after the fact. Throughout it draws on the tradecraft canon (Richards Heuer, ICD 203, Kahneman and Tversky, Tetlock, Flyvbjerg) and on how DSI Advisory applies that canon to the security industry's own alarms, most directly in its Alarm Test and its Predictions Scorecard.
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Choosing the Right Tool
Foresight has no shortage of methods: scenario axes, morphological analysis, cross-impact matrices, Delphi panels, trend extrapolation, backcasting and more. The immature analyst adopts one and defends it against all comers. The mature analyst treats the method as a choice, matched to the decision at hand, the time horizon and the kind of uncertainty in play. This module makes tool selection itself the object of study. It draws on Matthew Spaniol's work formalising foresight method choice, Rene Rohrbeck's corporate-foresight maturity model, and DSI's own method-family as a worked selection stack, and it names the failure modes that turn foresight into theatre.
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Capstone: Run a Foresight Cycle
The whole course converges here. Framing, scanning, alternative futures, stress-testing and war-gaming, structural analysis, calibration and scoring, communication, decision and monitoring are not separate tricks but one cycle. This capstone walks that cycle end to end, runs it on a real case, holds the finished product to a decision-making-under-deep-uncertainty standard, links scenarios to actual decisions and trigger indicators, and then hands the learner their own question to run through the same loop. It is the point where the schools of foresight are made to combine rather than compete.