Palais des congrès de Montréal

Strategic foresight · Facilitation · Capability building

The project

The Palais wanted to see the future coming. It had a new team for it, and no method yet.

Teach strategic foresight to Cellule Nova+, the Palais’s innovation team.
Frame its foresight program at the same time: what to watch, how far ahead to look, where to start.
Leave a collective memory after every workshop, so the team could carry on alone.

workshops in April 2023

questions asked of the future

collective memory after every workshop

The Cellule Nova+ team around a long boardroom table covered in sticky notes, laptops open on the workshop slides

Learn it, then use it within the hour

In 2023, the Palais gave its innovation cell, Cellule Nova+, a mandate: run a strategic foresight program. The team had varied expertise and plenty of curiosity. What it didn’t have was a shared idea of what foresight is, or of what this program should watch.

Éric led the project for &friends, and we designed and facilitated the workshops together. We chose not to teach foresight in a classroom and frame the program in a separate meeting. We did both at once. Each workshop opened with a short lesson, then put it to work on the Palais’s own reality. Every activity left one piece of the frame on the wall.

How we did it: four workshops

Workshop I: Framing (April 3). Learned: what strategic foresight is, and what it isn’t. Not a crystal ball, not futurology, not a statistical forecast. The futures cone, from possible to preferable. Left with: the first choices of the program, and 20 questions for the future.
Workshop II: Mapping (April 5). Learned: why foresight needs a map of the system, and why the map is never the territory. Left with: an internal and an external map of the Palais, merged into one ecosystem.
Workshop III: Scanning (April 17). Learned: the five traits of a weak signal (novelty, surprise, challenge, significance and delay), and how signals add up to a clue, a driver, then a trend. Left with: a first harvest of weak signals and a list of sources to follow.
Workshop IV: Reference future (April 20). Learned: a driver of change is a cause, a trend is the result you can observe, and a reference future is what happens if nothing surprising happens. Left with: a prioritized PESTEL and a first reference future of the Palais.

The futures cone: from today, the possible, plausible, probable and preferable futures widen toward the future — The futures cone, from the first workshop.

Diagram: scattered weak signals combine into a clue, the clue grows into a driver of change, and the driver produces a trend — How weak signals become a clue, a driver of change, then a trend.

Four participants standing in front of a wall of sticky notes, downtown Montréal through the window

Participants gathered at a pillar covered in sticky notes while one of them adds a new one

20 questions for the future

We asked the team what it wanted to know about the future, in the form of a question. Some were vast, some very concrete. A few looked for the downside of new things, which is healthy: an innovation team tends to see every novelty as good news. Remember the metaverse. A sample, translated from French:

How will we adapt to climate change?
What will an event feel like in the future?
How could we react in real time to how attendees feel?
How do we shrink the air travel of international conventions?
Will AI drive how events come to the Palais?
Will geopolitics hold our travellers back?
Will events get bigger or smaller?
Will we end up expanding the Palais?

A hand holding a sticky note: “Comment serait l’expérience d’un événement au futur ?”

A sticky note on the wall: “Allons-nous finir par agrandir le Palais ?”

A collective memory after every workshop

The learning didn’t stop when the workshop did. After each session, the team got a collective memory: everything it had produced, digitized, followed by our findings for what comes next and the actions to consider. Each activity became a recommendation for running the program. Among them:

Sit next to strategy. Bring Nova+ closer to the strategic planning team, and get that team used to scenarios.
Watch trends more than whispers. A weak signal can take five to ten years to matter. Emerging trends come first.
Run a 2-2-1 cycle. Two years observing a trend, two years experimenting, one year evaluating and implementing.
Start every meeting from the reference future. Check it still holds, update it, and make each scenario diverge from it.

The result

Cellule Nova+ came out of April knowing how to think about the future, with its own frame to start its first foresight initiatives. Not a report on the Palais’s future: a team able to write it itself.

The team. Project lead, workshop co-design and facilitation: Éric Letarte, &friends. Workshop co-design and facilitation: Jean-Sébastien Daigle, &friends. Client: Cellule Nova+, Palais des congrès de Montréal.