Many of the organisations we work with find themselves struggling to develop effective strategies to prepare them for the future. In turbulent situations with massive uncertainty or where the policy or environmental context means that there is limited historical precedent to guide future decisions a useful starting point is envisaging what the future might hold. Loop2 offer a range of futures processes to help you explore the impact of shifts in policy or other pressures, develop better strategic thinking skills or review the robustness of your current plans and ways of working:

• Simulations and realizations. Simulations are powerful ways of exploring future contexts. They can be based on a hypothetical context or in the real life state of your organization or partnership. Both have the potential to deliver extraordinary insights into the reactions and behaviours of individuals and organizations and their response to changing pressures or policies.
  
  The behavioural simulations we design work a bit like flight simulators that are used to train pilots or give the public a sense of what it is like to fly a plane. They are a vehicle for learning rather than predicting benhaviours or competencies. We spend as much time supporting people to think about what they have learned and the implications for the way they work as we do on the simulation process. The events themselves feel highly realistic for those taking part but take out the risks if things go wrong or individual or organizational interests are adversely affected by the actions of others.
  
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• Hypotheticals. A slightly different version of simulations hypotheticals are guided conversations led by experienced faciltators. Using a mix of scripted challenges and improvised scenarios our facilitators draw out the dynamics of future changes and allow participants to hear and understand each others plans, intentions and reactions and respond accordingly. Hypotheticals offer a safe, fast and interactive way of exploring current and future situations and can be an effective way of testing out new approaches prior to formal implementation.
• Scenario planning has proved an effective methodology for many large corporations in preparing for turbulent situations and alternative futures. We can develop researched scenarios or design processes that enable your teams to generate their own powerful scenarios and identify those actions that appear to be robust under each future picure. Scenario planning can be run as a discrete exercise or as part of a wider strategy development process. We help you explore different political, economic, environmental, social and technological change drivers – at a macro level (the things that are difficult to control and influence) and the impacts of those trends on local players, We use creative thinking and decision processes to ensure all possible angles are covered. Where possible we use multiple groups to enable different interpretations to emerge for comparison.
• Futures research. As well as the interactive processes outlined above we also offer more traditional research methods from critical appraisals and literature reviews to Delphi studies, surveys and focus groups.