If you knew your community’s future, what would you do? You would know and anticipate challenges, maximize opportunities, and mitigate expenses. You would probably run a more prepared, agile, and responsive local government.

Most of us use some sort of foresight all the time—monitoring the weather forecast to prepare for the next day or creating alternative scenarios for a future retirement. Professional futurists use various tools to develop preferred scenarios, and these same tools can be learned and incorporated into an organizational or community strategic plan that works for your local government.

Author Rebecca Ryan, who is the resident futurist at the Alliance for Innovation and founder and co-owner of a consulting firm, is driven by her love of cities and counties and the Alliance for Innovation’s community of local governments. She has developed a program that helps staff in forward-looking organizations to think like a futurist and adapt the tools of strategic foresight to propel their communities into a future they desire and can influence.

According to Ryan, local governments can apply six key steps to their planning regime:

Frame the Issue. A manager can ask, What is the domain he or she is trying to understand? Here, the domain is defined quite specifically by what, who, and when. A domain question, for example, might be, “Will there be enough sufficiently trained public administrators to manage our cities and counties in 2030, when the last baby boomer manager has retired?”

Scan. This step involves surveying the trends and forces that may shape the future of the domain question. Key trends might include:

• How might social trends, like birth rates, aging in place, or increased urbanization, impact that domain?
• How will technology impact the public administrator’s role?
• What environmental factors might change the issues local government’s face?
• Will the economy change so drastically that local governments can survive?
• How will politics—both local and global—impact the places we live?
• Will governance structures adapt and change as our communities evolve?

Forecast. Create alternative scenarios applying the trends and forces you have just scanned. What would happen if you only watch and do nothing? What pro-active actions could be taken to influence the 2030 outcomes? What disruptions might occur to dramatically influence the domain? Are those disruptions likely to be positive or negative?

Vision. What is the preferred future for your domain? What specifically do you want that future to look like (i.e., construct you own reality)? What are the success factors that could help you achieve it? What are metrics of success and how would they be identified and monitored?

Plan. Working backwards from your date in the future, what milestones would need to be achieved, strategies put in place, and feedback loops established to achieve the vision?

Act. What should you do now to make your vision happen? Who else do you need to enlist to help you make it a reality?

The term futurist isn’t new. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the earliest use of the term futurism in English as early as 1842. The term, however, is fairly new in the world of local government professionals. That is why the Alliance for Innovation is now hosting workshops, led by Ryan, to teach staff across North America how to apply the tools of futuring in planning for their communities.

Planning for the future is an important role for local governments. In some sense, our job is to ensure that the community is not only safe, attractive, and viable for today’s residents, but also for the many generations to come. It is essential that a community act today while envisioning how that community will function 100 years from now.

Strategic planning can help you accomplish your near-term goals and is obviously a critical tool to help get that done. But for the long-term vision, futuring can become an ongoing discipline that’s integrated into your overall community planning.

Using strategic foresight is not fortune telling and does not require a crystal ball. Predicting a single future is, in fact, not possible and more so, probably irresponsible. But anticipating the future and trying to imagine how to make that positive future a reality is the job that public employees signed up for. Learning to manage like a futurist can help you do that.