Training and Development Platform for Strategic Foresight and Optimized Decision Making

An essential attribute of any successful organization is the ability to chart the best path forward despite the uncertainty of the future. The practice of strategic foresight helps chart this path not by predicting the future but by looking at potential sources of disruption and then harnessing what LtCol Jacob Sotiriadis, Director of Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC)'s Strategic Foresight and Futures Branch, has called "weak signals and emerging trends" and overlaying these with an organization's mission set to help "future-proof" strategic planning, allowing it to weather a broad range of disruptions and possible futures.  Despite ongoing efforts to compress innovation timelines, lead times for developing new systems in the aerospace domain remain long, placing a high premium on Air Force strategic planners with the foresight to identify "weak signals and emerging trends" and the imagination necessary to imagine possible futures that may result even when the futures diverge sharply from past experience. Offeror's objective is to develop a software-based online platform that combines a competency model, an asynchronous distributed assessment mechanism, training modules, and AI-informed analytics to identify and develop strategic foresight among airmen. Based on the latest advances in cross-disciplinary academic research, this platform will enable the Air Force to more accurately identify and track the most promising strategic thinkers earlier in their careers and to improve strategic foresight among current planners. The platform will help equip all airmen with the skills necessary to identify, measure and manage uncertainty and risk and to with the ability to contribute to the develop of strategic scenario plans and concepts of operations necessary for avoiding strategic surprise while shaping the future force.  In phase I of this proposal, in collaboration with Event Horizons, one of the country's foremost strategic foresight consultancies, and the West Virginia University Innovation Corporation, Offer will work with WVU-affiliated instructional design and organizational behavior experts to a) formalize a strategic foresight competency model and associated assessment instrument tailored to the US Air Force, b) research strategic foresight interventions that decrease the tendency of individuals to prematurely fixate on a focal hypothesis—that is, to cling to pre-existing mental models and fail to update them in the face of new information - and outline associated instructional modules, and c) develop a plan for prototyping a SaaS delivery platform integrated with existing Air Force systems for conducting assessments and delivering training.