Embedded Files
The S4 Futures Framework was created with a particular focus on driving innovation through Foresight and Scenario Planning, as catalysts for change.
Our Framework has been published multiple times and is used as a basis for Foresight efforts by organizations across the world.
On this page you will find an overview of the S4 Futures Framework; if you want a deep dive into the framework, you can explore its publications.
Take me to Publications
Want an introduction into the field of Foresight, and to learn how to apply the framework directly from us?
The S4 Futures Framework was developed by ALVA as a way to incorporate key pieces of thinking, best practices, and overlooked aspects of other schools of thought, or even other disciplines altogether, into the intuitive and simple but highly effective bones of the Intuitive Logics School process.
There are four interrelated phases on the framework, each one building on the previous steps.
Scoping & Designing
Scoping & Designing
Scanning & Screening
Scanning & Screening
Scenarios & Foresight
Scenarios & Foresight
Strategy & Innovation
Strategy & Innovation
- Aim and intention of the project. Available resources
- Framing and Scoping the project. Setting the topic to be explored and how far we want to explore into the future.
- Clarification of the strategic Focal Issue and the Time Horizon (+ supporting questions).
- Audience and Foresight team. Work environment
- Deepening the understanding of the context of the topic in the defined time horizon. Scanning the organizational environment: trends and megatrends; weak signals and emergent issues; wild cards, black swans and black elephants
- Identification of key themes, collection of ideas and insights and organization of information from a wide range of sources, including data on potential sources of future change.
- Distinction, categorization, and selection of different types of drivers of change, with a special focus on key uncertainties and predetermined elements.
- Literature review and data collection, both primary and secondary. Qualitative research and/or quantitative research.
- Generation and description of the scenarios.
- Simulation of possible, plausible and relevant futures through the development and exploration of strategic scenarios, using the Intuitive-Logics School and other scenario building approaches like the Morphological Method, the Extreme-World Method, the Inductive Approach or the Incremental Approach.
- Link scenarios with action. Analyse implications and options.
- Explicit articulation of Foresight and Scenarios with Strategy and Innovation concepts and tools.
- Application of Strategy and/or Innovation methodologies, linking them with the scenarios.
- Build a monitoring system, including precursor/early indicators that can anticipate the development of specific scenarios.
Page updated
Report abuse