How can organizations effectively scan and understand the horizon in fast-paced, rapidly evolving environments? More so, how can this be done without an entire team of people dedicated to ongoing research?
Wigdan Seedahmed, Product Management Consultant at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has spent the last handful of years tackling this issue by building an automated horizon scanner. Her innovative tool was first used by UNDP Sudan to mainly answer the questions: "What's next after mapping and identifying signals of change?", "What comes next after building future scenarios?", and "How do we operationalize foresight?". This involves addressing key challenges faced by the UNDP and partners at country office level. A localized version is being used by UNDP Egypt (launching publicly in October) to mainstream innovation in UNDP's work and reap the benefits of using innovative tools to tackle country office challenges, such as resilient programmatic response and intervention design, data lags, high costs of data collection, and conflicting data sources.
Join this conversation on Thursday, September 26 at 8am Pacific Time when Wigdan will demo the tool and explore how the automated horizon scanner works, how it's currently being used, and other potentially exciting use cases!