Description

Over 85% of executives expect their industry to be disrupted within five years — yet most organizations still plan as if tomorrow will look like today. In 1972, Shell's scenario planners saw the oil crisis coming when no forecast did. Fifty years on, foresight is still the cheapest competitive advantage available — and our InnoSurvey data, from 10,000+ assessed organizations in 105 countries, shows "Exploiting Insights" is the weakest-scoring ISO 56002 principle in the world.

This course teaches the discipline. Not prediction — a scenario is not a prediction; it is a hypothesis about an uncertain future, deliberately stretched to the extremes where insight lives. You learn the five-step method — Collect, Categorize, Stretch, Combine, Develop — and you turn futures into decisions. The course is grounded in ISO 56006:2021, the member of the ISO 56000 family written for strategic intelligence management: you walk its full intelligence cycle on your own organization, and the artefacts you build are the evidence an ISO 56001 auditor asks for under clauses 4.1, 6.1, 7.1.5 and 8.2.

The professional tools are included. Three months' full access to PESTLED360 — the world's first collaborative macro driver library, seven dimensions and a public global key-driver database — and Scenarios360, the guided scenario engine that generates your scenarios and action lists. The same environment Innovation360's Licensed Practitioners use with clients worldwide. 45 minutes are hands-on, in the tools, on your own organization. You do not leave with templates. You leave with a working foresight setup.

You will learn to:

• Scan — build a sourced macro radar across all seven PESTLED dimensions, enriched with the 7 Questions interview technique ("If you could speak to someone from the future, what would you ask?"), and sort every driver on the Driver Map — Important × Certain — into its four verdicts: prioritize and act, scenario plan, monitor and track, park. Why Shell saw 1972 coming and Kodak did not: never lack of data, always lack of method.
• Shape — stretch each critical uncertainty into an axis with extreme poles, cross two of them into four distinct futures, and run the seven-step scenario build (Persson, Claesson, Penker 2019) through to timeline, name and narrative. Wire each future's engine — one reinforcing main loop plus its balancing loops — so the story actually runs, then wind-tunnel it, including with AI ("argue why this scenario is wrong").
• Steer — extract the common needs that recur across all four futures, set early-warning indicators with sources and cadence, and replace roadmap dates with pre-agreed triggers: "we act if…", never "we act on date…". Sort your moves into robust moves, bets and options.

Every user can also explore the open example client Trading International Inc — a finished PESTLED and the complete "Trading International Scenario 2030" with its generated report — and the PESTLED canvas is built for teams: share the contribution link and colleagues add forces live or in advance.

Three chapters — SCAN, SHAPE, STEER — nine recorded sub-chapters and nine quizzes, three per chapter. You finish with your own PESTLED, your own Driver Map, four named scenarios with action lists, and a one-page foresight brief with indicators and triggers. It lives in the tool, not in a drawer.

Included: 3 months' full access to PESTLED360 & Scenarios360 · the 16-page Course Companion with full references · the Foresight Workbook · the open example client · certificate add-on, built to be worn on LinkedIn.

Course 1 of The Navigator Stack: foresight finds the areas; Mastering Uncertainty makes the unknown actionable; Innovation Sandboxing and Business Experiments reduce the uncertainty until a project worth backing is defined; Assessing & Measuring Innovation Management institutionalizes the way of working. Complete three of the four and earn the Uncertainty Navigator credential.

You cannot predict. You can still see it coming. What would we see first — and what do we do when we see it?

Prerequisites and audience

No formal prerequisites are required. A basic understanding of strategy work — and a willingness to think in scenarios rather than forecasts — is enough; the method is taught from the ground up.

The course is designed for executives and strategists who have been surprised once too often; innovation and strategy teams building an ISO 56002-aligned practice ("Exploiting Insights", Principle 5); consultants and advisors who want a professional foresight setup for client work; and anyone whose plans assume tomorrow looks like today.

This is Course 1 of The Navigator Stack. Mastering Uncertainty is the natural next course — foresight finds the areas, and Mastering Uncertainty makes the unknown actionable.

Course Goal

After completing the course, participants can sense change early, turn it into four internally consistent futures, and convert those futures into decisions agreed before the data arrives. They will be able to:

• Explain why smart organizations miss obvious change — Shell vs the field in 1972, Kodak vs Fujifilm — and why it is never lack of data, always lack of method
• Use the vocabulary precisely — signal, weak signal, trend, driver, implication — and distinguish environmental scanning from strategic intelligence and strategic foresight
• COLLECT: build a sourced macro radar across all seven PESTLED dimensions in PESTLED360, using the 7 Questions technique and the Public Global Key Driver Database
• CATEGORIZE: place every driver on the Driver Map — Important × Certain — and assign one of four verdicts: prioritize and act, scenario plan, monitor and track, park
• STRETCH and COMBINE: turn critical uncertainties into axes with extreme poles and build the 2×2 cross into four distinct futures — knowing why the first cross is rarely the best
• DEVELOP: run the seven-step scenario build (Persson, Claesson, Penker 2019) in Scenarios360 and generate scenarios and action lists
• Wire and wind-tunnel each future's engine — one reinforcing main loop plus its balancing loops — and narrate it so it sticks: a headline, a promise, a voice
• STEER: extract the common needs that recur across all four futures, set early-warning indicators with named sources and cadence, and write pre-agreed triggers — "we act if…", never "we act on date…"
• Sort moves into robust moves, bets and options, and place them on the three horizons
• Run AI-assisted driver sweeps across 1,000+ sources with hallucination guardrails — AI as radar, not oracle
• Relate the work to ISO 56006 and the intelligence cycle, and produce the artefacts an ISO 56001 auditor asks for under clauses 4.1, 6.1, 7.1.5 and 8.2
• Hand the Important × Uncertain quadrant over to the next step, and run the rhythm in Transformation360 when a system is wanted — the method itself needs only paper, a wall and discipline

Certificate

Certificate: Intelligent Foresighting — available as a USD 29 add-on after passing all nine quizzes. A micro-credential for your LinkedIn profile.

Complete three of the four Navigator courses — Intelligent Foresighting, Mastering Uncertainty, Innovation Sandboxing and Business Experiments — and earn the Uncertainty Navigator credential.

Instructor

Magnus Penker

Magnus Penker is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author and an internationally-renowned thought leader on innovation, sustainability, and business transformation. He is a speaker at prestigious global forums and events such as the Global Peter Drucker Forum, and at top-ranked international business and design schools, a variety of associations, and some of the world’s largest companies. Magnus recently launched the bestseller Play Bold, is writing a five-volume series The Complete Guide to Business Innovation, is a former contributing editor at the International Journal of Innovation Science, and pens a column for the American business magazine Inc Magazine.
As a result of these achievements he has been honored with the Business Worldwide Magazine’s award for “Most Innovative CEO Sweden 2016” and was appointed a Global Top 100 CEO by CEO Monthly in 2018. Additionally, he has launched 10 start-ups as well as acquired, turned around, and sold 30+ SMEs all over Europe.

Erin (Pink) Mosley
2026-10-10

Excellent, detailed step-by-step overview of core Innovation360 tools and approaches, with examples. I always like seeing the latest evolution of what's happening!

Allan Fors
2026-10-05

Excellent practical course for seeing what’s coming! The course offers a clear way to explore emerging trends, signals, uncertainties, and possible future scenarios and, most importantly, turn these insights into meaningful strategic action. I particularly appreciated the focus on looking beyond the obvious and challenging conventional assumptions. The tools included make it easier to structure conversations with teams, identify potential disruptions early, and build a more future-ready organization.

Debasis Sengupta
2026-10-04

This is an excellent course with great insights supported by the tools. The thing I like most is the live examples of using the tools PESTLED360 and Scenario360