In today's rapidly changing world, it is more important than ever to be able to manage uncertainty and fast-paced change. Many organisations struggle with this, but there are ways to manage it effectively. Here are 10 tips to help you get started.

The future is now. The pace of change and innovation has never been so fast or relentless. As a result, organisations need to plan for impact and growth with an eye on the future - which means using futures intelligence: trends, signals, emerging changes data to build foresight.

The ACNC data set selected for analysis comprises 3,914 Large ($1M+ annual revenue) Australian charity entities with DGR Item 1 or 4 and ACNC Group entities who have submitted audited financial statements and conducted activities in 2019. These entities represent $102B of annual revenue, ~%60 of the total 2019 revenue reported by Australian charity entities to the ACNC.

Innovation is a tricky beast. It's not always clear that the risks outweigh the rewards. For those of us in for-purpose organisations, getting the business case right to fund innovation is critical; uncertainty can be a roadblock, but it doesn't have to be.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to using strategic foresight in your business. The key is to experiment, find what works for you, and adapt as needed.

CPQQRT stands for Context, Purpose, Quality, Quantity, Resources, and Time. It was developed by Elliot Jaques, a Canadian organisational psychologist, and first referenced in 1994 in the book "Executive leadership: a practical guide to managing complexity".

A good way to create alternative views of futures is by building scenarios. This involves bringing together different trends, phenomena, and uncertainties to understand their interdependence and joint implications.

One way that long-range planning is enhanced is through the creation of various alternative futures, which are significantly different from one another. The scenarios that planners create can be based on different assumptions about technology, demography, economics, politics, and other factors.

When it comes to planning, looking at what's in the rearview mirror is not enough. You need to look ahead through the windshield at the road ahead.

You can use the process of identifying Black Elephants, Swans and Jellyfish in your planning to drive new thinking, support diverse plans, build responsive systems and stretch your planning paradigms into longer time horizons.

For-purpose CEOs and Boards will need to consider some big challenges as they plan for the next 5 to 10 years.

The best response to the turbulence and uncertainty being faced by the not-for-profit sector is to focus on delivering long-term value. This means having a 5 to 10 view of how the world is changing and how your organisation will respond to, exploit, or mitigate these changes. This is not about the prediction of the future, a futile activity, but rather about being ready for what might happen next.

Here’s two frames to help you with your planning and decision making:

Plans=knowledge+assumptions,

and

performance=Plans(reality)

In a competitive world, an organisation's success is determined by its ability to stay ahead of others and adapt to the needs of its stakeholders and the fast-changing world it operates in.

Build a lasting future for your business with foresight-driven planning. Discover how tools, data, and aligned actions can help you stay agile and achieve long-term goals.

Forward thinking leaders need to develop the ability to scan for signals, issues and trends that are developing now and create a view on how they might play across a range of futures.

It can be easy to believe that tomorrow will be like today—that customers will have the same demands, that businesses will operate in the same way, or that Governments will make similar decisions. These beliefs are comforting, in part because they suggest that nothing fundamental will change in our futures. But if we believe these things about futures, then we are limiting those who come after us to live in a world that is less than what it could be.

Forward-thinking CEOs and Boards are using foresight to plan for tomorrow. They're looking 5,10,20 years into the future to see what might happen. By doing this, they're able to make today's decisions with more confidence and greater reliability.

Which futures will appear? There are many different variations of futures emerging. It may sound far fetched… but robots may dance.

The Futures Triangle is a tool developed by Dr Sohail Inayatullah in 2008 that not-for-profit CEOs and Boards can use to create a frame from within which to view the current forces at work on their organisation's planning and decision making for impact and future growth. It's a great place to start a foresight project as it can bring to life the different forces at play.