Foresight Leadership: The Future of Nursing and Health

The purpose of the Foresight Leadership initiative is to design and build a transformational leadership capacity ecosystem that is organized around five design elements: Purpose (why the work is important to the community), Principles (what rules must be obeyed in order to realize purpose), Participants (who must be included to achieve the purpose), Structure (how will organization distribute control), Practice (what is to be done-what and how will offers be to users and clients).

The University of Minnesota School Of Nursing and the Katharine J Densford International Center for Nursing Leadership will be the first to establish a nursing foresight initiative to educate, train, and consult with organizations about the use of foresight methods in nursing and health to support the health of people and communities. Products of such an initiative include courses, a certificate program offering, building on the planting seeds of innovation partnership, consulting partnerships, and expanding the scholarship and communities of practice and learning related to foresight and innovation.

Assumptions:

• Visionary health innovation leadership presupposes a futures time orientation.
• A future time orientation is reinforced by foresight thinking and strategic planning skills.
• Foresight thinking is a skill that can be taught and used for strategic foresight planning.
• Foresight thinking and strategic foresight planning are supported by environmental scanning of weak signals and trends that are likely to become movements.
• Partnerships with organizations that do environmental scanning and foresight work can be useful to develop insights about nursing and health related trends locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.
• Data gathered through scanning can be processed with several foresight methodologies to develop scenarios about preferred futures.
• Scenarios regarding preferred futures can be used to promote organizational learning and support strategic foresight planning and build transformational leadership capacity.
• Strategic foresight planning can be used to develop curriculum innovations, advance practice initiatives and create new products, services, and partnerships in health care contexts.
• Through use and application of Rainforest Eco-System Innovation Principles, The Densford Center will partner with organizations to design, develop, implement and evaluate programs and services that build transformational leadership capacity with desired futures in mind. Examples include: Communities of the Future, Association of Professional Futurists, the World Future Society, World Futures Studies Federation, Shaping Tomorrow, Umio Health).