Strategic Foresight at NIOSH

This webinar featured Rachel Maguire, Research Director, Institute for the Future (IFTF). Rachel provided highlights from IFTF’s research into how the changing nature of work is influencing the health of individuals, families, and communities over the coming decades. She offered a futures perspective on how work arrangements such as gig, contingent, and shift work are combining with economic policies and technological forces to shape the future conditions for work. Rachel also shared IFTF human-centered forecasts to spark conversation about the impact these work arrangements may have on individual and collective health and well-being.

This webinar featured Cho Khong from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Cho discussed how scenario planning can help organizations think strategically and respond to change.  He drew on his experience in the Shell scenarios team and elsewhere to examine and to assess the integration of strategic foresight and scenario planning into organizational planning and practice.

This webinar featured perspectives from Policy Horizons Canada, an organization that conducts strategic foresight to help the Government of Canada develop future-oriented policy and programs that are more robust, resilient, and responsive in the face of disruptive change. Kristel Van der Elst, Director General of Policy Horizons Canada, spoke about the importance of strategic foresight for governments and shared examples of how foresight can be used to inform the development of policies and programs in the face of an uncertain future.

Strategic foresight is a practice rooted in futures studies that includes the development and analysis of plausible alternative futures as inputs to strategic plans and actions. In this webinar, Sarah Felknor, from the Office of Research Integration at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), presented findings from the first NIOSH strategic foresight project. This project, which concluded September 2021, envisions four plausible futures and their implications for OSH.

Jessica Streit, Deputy Director of the NIOSH Office of Research Integration, explored strategic foresight as a tool that can enhance our capacity to anticipate, and even shape, the future as it pertains to work in order to advance worker safety, health, and well-being. Strategic foresight is a practice rooted in futures studies that includes the development and analysis of plausible alternative futures as inputs to strategic plans and actions.

Heather Benoit, Senior Managing Director of Strategic Foresight at Strategic Government Resources (SGR), provided a review and rich discussion of the Three Horizons Framework, which is a useful tool for understanding the evolution of change over time. Jennifer Tsitsopoulos, Principal Innovation Strategist from Board of Innovation, discussed how foresight can prepare the next generation of leaders to be successful in a changing world of work.

During this interactive event, staff from across NIOSH explored sample foresight projects from the Institute for the Future (IFTF) to enhance their understanding of mapping drivers into typical patterns of change. This exercise is a critical first step in producing unique plausible alternative future scenarios.

Dr. Richard Puddy from the CDC Office of the Associate Director for Policy and Strategy introduced the CDC Strategic Foresight Learning and Action Network (SF-LAN) and provided updates on a project exploring the Future of Evidence at CDC. Dr. Matthew Mauldin from the CDC Deputy Director for Public Health Service and Implementation Science Office provided updates on a project exploring the Future of Emergency Lab Preparedness.

Rafael Ramírez, Director of the Oxford Scenarios Programme in the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, overviewed the application and distinguishing features of the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach, which has been widely adopted by science-centric organizations (e.g., Royal Society of Chemistry, European Patent Office, and the Nuclear Safeguards unit in the International Atomic Energy Agency), NGOs (e.g., Diabetes UK), police forces, cities, and private companies. At the time of the presentation, the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach was being deployed by those planning the future of research on COVID-19.

Lyn Jeffery, Director of Foresight Essentials at the Institute for the Future, shared strategies for moving from signals and drivers of change to forecasts, which are communicable and thought-provoking views of the future.

Eric Popiel, Strategic Workforce Analyst from the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), provided a practical overview of a widely-accepted approach to searching for and organizing signals of change that may influence the future.

Steven Popper, Senior Economist at RAND and Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and Richard Silberglitt, Senior Physical Scientist at RAND and Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, jointly provided an overview of the roots of foresight and discussed the contemporary foresight portfolio RAND maintains today.

Eric Popiel, Strategic Workforce Analyst from the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) discussed the new OPM Strategic Foresight Initiative, which assists federal agencies in the development of foresight methodologies and processes to effectively plan for the workforce of the 21st century.

Tom Savel, Director of the CDC Emerging Technology and Design and Acceleration Branch, provided a live demonstration of HORIZON, an exciting new CDC Strategic Foresight Scanning tool.

The NIOSH Office of Research Integration (ORI) held the inaugural Foresight Friday @ NIOSH in October 2020. This invitation-only meeting served as a debrief session to a September 2020 strategic foresight training delivered to NIOSH leadership by the University of Houston. During this meeting, ORI introduced NIOSH’s new strategic foresight efforts, reviewed training evaluation results, and discussed next steps for building foresight capacity at NIOSH.