Interview
Interview develops understanding of the various stakeholder viewpoints in issue areas by phone, face-to-face or electronically.
Uses of the method
- Quickly elicit stakeholders views on the future of a topic, their hopes,
fears and solutions to issues
Benefits
- Very inclusive
- Dialog means more in-depth understanding of interviewees thoughts
Disadvantages
- Can be time-consuming and costly with large stakeholder groups
- Requires good listening and documenting skills
Steps to complete
- Determine the issue to be addressed
- Decide on the participants
- Create the right message and atmosphere for maximum participant response
- Conduct the interviews by telephone, face-to-face or electronically
- Develop causal maps of the responses using the Modeling tools here (individual and/or aggregated)
- Conduct check-back interviews to ensure correct interpretation of views
- Finalize and agree a single causal map with participants
- Determine the fixed elements (almost certain hard trends) that will inform your strategic response: slow-changing phenomena e.g. demographic shifts, constrained situations e.g. resource limits, in the pipeline e.g. aging of baby boomers, inevitable collisions e.g. climate change arguments.
- Capture critical uncertainties i.e. variables, soft trends and potential surprises. Both these and the fixed elements will be key to creating scenarios and examining potential future paradigm shifts.
- Capture unique insight into new ways of seeing that can be utilized by the organization.
- What conclusions can we draw from the exercise(s)?
- How might the future be different?
- How does A affect B?
- What is likely to remain the same or change significantly?
- What are the likely outcomes?
- What and who will likely shape our future?
- Where could we be most affected by change?
- What might we do about it?
- What don't we know that we need to know?
- What should we do now, today?
- Why do we care?
- When should we aim to meet on this?
- Next steps could include a further round of iteration, a recommendation on how to get the answers or use of other research and methods such as 'Brainstorm' to create more vantage points on the issue.
Collaboration
This method and your response can be shared with other members or kept private using the 'Privacy' field and through the 'Tag', 'Report' and 'Forum' functionalities. Use 'Tag' and/or 'Report' to aggregate your analyzes, or add a 'Forum' to ask others where they agree/disagree and encourage them to make their own analysis from their unique vantage point.
Click the 'Invite tab to send invitations to other members or non-members (colleagues, external experts etc.) to ask for their input. You can whether or not you want anonymous responses. These can be viewed and exported within the Responses tab.
Further reference
Contact us
Even with all the advice and tools we have provided here starting a foresight project from scratch can be a daunting prospect to a beginner. Let us know if you need help with this method or want a group facilitation exercise or full project or program carrying out by us. We promise to leave behind more internal knowledgeable people who can expand your initiative for better organizational performance.
Contact us today for a free discussion on your needs.
Are there other enhancements or new methods you would like to see here? Let us know and we will do our best to respond with a solution quickly.
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