It’s difficult for researchers in industry to focus their stakeholders on the future, given the relentless urgency of near-term planning. This tutorial equips participants with practical steps, critical self-knowledge, and organizational acumen to tackle this ongoing challenge. We review the mindsets, practices, tools, and methods central to strategic forecasting, with a particular emphasis on ethnographic methods.
The session includes:
- A brief history of strategic foresight
- Psychological, cultural & organizational barriers to thinking about the future
- Anatomy of the typical strategic foresight project
- The primary methods for strategic foresight and when and how to use
- Formulating your own strategic foresight plan for immediate use
The tutorial combines brief lectures, small group exercises, and large-group discussions. By the end of the tutorial, participants will have a draft strategic foresight plan for themselves, and will be on a first-name basis with most people in the course.
Instructor
Sam Ladner (she/her) is a sociologist who helps teams innovate, design, and learn. She is the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector and Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research. Dr. Ladner has been an EPIC member since 2010, and has served on many EPIC committees, as Co-Chair of the annual conference, and as an EPIC Course instructor since 2018. She has taught at several institutions including York University, University of Washington, Ontario College of Art and Design University, and has guest lectured at Harvard University. She has worked on dozens of advanced software projects at Microsoft, Amazon and many other client companies. She currently works at Workday, an enterprise software company, as a Senior Principal Researcher studying the future of work. She received her PhD in sociology from York University and lives in the Bay Area with her husband and cat.
