One great future perspectives methodology is to organize a series of meetings with leading researchers for the organization and its partners to learn about pertinent technology that is emerging from their labs. This is the time in the technology readiness path where the technology can be shaped to meet the needs of a customer set in an more expeditious, focused, and less-risky way.

Understanding the future is a difficult process to jump start within a group. Diverse care-abouts, mindsets, and knowledge assets are needed to develop, communicate, and implement an organization’s strategy. Grand Challenges Workshops are used to get the organization’s stakeholders on the right starting block. When people realize and agree on the challenges facing the organization, it is easier for them to work on solutions together. The Strategic Pathways  team organizes, conducts, and documents such workshops.

This training is built to the specific needs and culture of the organization. This educational seminar is structured to provide insight that leads an organization to the realization that it must transform. The next step in planning is giving the organization the tools, cultural orientation, and incentive to make that transformation.

Successful focusing projects involve input from every current and future stakeholder within the project’s scope. This involvement brings dividends in terms of the innovativeness and wisdom of the focus area selection, the sophistication of the resulting action plans, and the increase of buy-in. This involves learning to work collaboratively in a team of teams. Instruction in the new methods, tools, and techniques of collaboration is a valuable part of any focusing activity.

In any phase of a strategic or tactical planning endeavor, Strategic Pathways  is available to move the effort forward. In a variety of settings, such as ideation sessions, small workshops, or conferences, the team's insights and tradecraft can be called on for point services to either conduct, train facilitators, or be an "out of the box" team member.

Technology management is a new competency for most organizations. Strategic Pathways  team has transferred years of experience in the field, frameworks it has developed, and tools it has built and refined into in-house education for this critical new business function. Beyond a stand-alone offering, this education package can be done in conjunction with project engagement to provide a basic level of skills and a vocabulary that can be used during the engagement and afterwards, assuring that the activity is sustainable.

Through an independent peer review of a strategy, strategic assessment, or even the strategy setting process itself, the team can enhance your strategy's future perspective resulting in increased buy-in and risk mitigation. The Strategic Pathways team is experienced in strategy setting, has a wide range of applicable knowledge in technology, organizational theory, and societal trends, and offers a fresh perspective in connecting the dots.

These games are serious. Adapted from the world of video games and war games, they are a powerful way to engage people who are more action-oriented than cerebral. They can make a strategy more actionable, promote tighter collaboration between planner and implementer, and bring out additional innovative elements to the strategy. A valuable feature of this methodology is its ability to use remote collaboration to improve the time, efficiency, and scope of the strategy setting process.

It is important that people within an organization be equipped with the tradecraft to understand the future and find ways to harness it. Our training not only provides the tools for knowing the future, but it introduces methodologies to communicate strategic planning, and to organize collaborative teams for planning for the future.