Working with your organisation

How Foresight consultancy works

The purpose is agreed. The mix of activities develops as we learn. Some activities happen once; others recur. There is no fixed order or frequency.

Understanding the work and the people.

Conversation, structured interviews, observation and reading bring different perspectives into the same picture. What we learn through one activity informs the questions we explore through another.

Conversations

Unstructured conversations let people describe their work in their own terms, raise unexpected issues and return to questions as their thinking develops.

Structured interviews

Interviews begin with directors, then extend to the senior leadership team and wider staff group. We explore responsibilities, experiences and differing perspectives in more depth.

Observation

We attend meetings and briefings and observe everyday interactions, paying attention to how people communicate, make decisions and work together.

Reading

We examine policies, procedures, guides and other relevant documents, comparing the organisation’s written expectations with people’s experience of the work.

Other activities we draw on.

The situation determines which of these activities are useful. We agree the purpose with the people involved and revisit the approach as the work develops.

See how work really happens

Site visits: Meet people where the work happens, including partner organisations.
Working alongside people: Take part in everyday work to understand its demands and constraints.
Job shadowing: Follow someone through their working day.
Following a piece of work: Trace a request through decisions, handovers and delivery.
Examining workloads: Understand competing demands, interruptions and pressure on people’s time.
Tracing communication: Follow how information reaches people, where it stops and how it changes.

Hear, compare and test perspectives

Group discussions: Hear how colleagues experience the same situation differently.
Anonymous feedback: Provide a way to raise concerns that people are reluctant to discuss openly.
Reviewing real examples: Examine a successful project, difficult decision, disagreement or incident.
Mapping responsibilities: Establish who does what, who decides and where authority sits.
Testing our understanding: Take emerging findings back to people and invite corrections.

Work through problems together

Workshops: Explore a particular issue together and develop practical responses.
Facilitating difficult conversations: Help people discuss disagreements, expectations and working relationships.
Practising scenarios: Explore how people respond to realistic situations and unexpected demands.
Helping with an immediate problem: Get involved when something needs attention during the consultancy.

Support action and keep learning

Trying small adjustments: Test an agreed approach in everyday work and examine what happens.
Providing coaching: Support individuals as they work through decisions and responsibilities.
Returning to earlier questions: Revisit assumptions and agreements as circumstances develop.

A shared picture. Agreed priorities.

We bring what we learn into a Commonly Recognised Information Picture (CRIP): the history, current situation, risks and opportunities, aim and objectives, resources and programme timeline. We check that picture with the people involved and revise it when new information emerges.

Through Stop, Start, Continue (SSC), we agree what people need to stop doing, start doing and continue doing. Those agreements provide the basis for the support that follows.

See this work with Dan Pope and CLEAN-Air(Africa)

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