Red hat

Red hat attempts to forecast the actions of others.

Uses of the method

Competitor/adversary analysis

Benefits

Puts the analyst in their opponents shoes
May help gain a more accurate understanding of the opponents likely actions/reactions
Stimulates fresh thinking and generates new perspectives

Disadvantages

Difficult to know another's mind
Situations often change the desired actions of an opponent
Can be biased by the analysts worldview

Steps to complete

Establish an expert panel with deep knowledge of the adversary
Develop a challenge about the adversary's current position and likely desires
Challenge the experts to develop alternatives about how the adversary might respond to the challenge
Summarize as likely strategies that the adversary could adopt
Determine the most likely strategy. [Use Delphi analysis to rank, sort and determine experts views on the most likely]
Assess the impact of this strategy on your organization
Capture your most exciting idea and biggest fear
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 variable i.e. uncertainties, 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?
Develop next steps and determine if any further research required

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

Structured Analytic Techniques, Heuer & Pherson, CQ Press 2010

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.

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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Red hat

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