A Detailed Account on How to Frame a Futures & Foresight Project

Framing a futures and foresight project before the project takes off involves defining as clearly as possible what the project is going to be about [1–4]. Because framing is carried out in any consulting project, it cannot be considered a futures and foresight skill. Rather, it’s a generic consulting/facilitation skill. Indeed, van der Heijden called framing the practitioner’s art [1]. Yet, it’s beyond doubt that framing in the context of futures and foresight is critical as whether it is done well or not can determine the success or failure of the whole project. Hence, this article will explain all there is to know about how to frame a futures and foresight project appropriately according to contextual needs. It will focus on the most common situation in futures and foresight consulting, i.e., framing a futures and foresight project for an organization doing primarily explorative scenarios, and then focusing on normative strategies afterwards, although the following guidelines can be equally applied with little or no change to normative scenarios (for an explanation of the difference between explorative scenarios and normative scenarios, see this article/video).