Approximately 4 hours to complete
Earn a record of completion
Audio recording + long-form content
Course Overview
Futures studies is an approach to long-term strategic planning. It involves examining emerging and evolving risks to help think about the future as a set of multiple, plausible alternatives. By evaluating this set of alternative futures, we can identify proactive measures to take now to manage our risk and steer our organization toward our preferred futures.
This course offers a practical, actionable approach for conducting futures studies to identify emerging trends and risks relevant to the fields of homeland security, emergency management, and public safety. This course assists practitioners in developing these plausible alternative futures, generating strategic foresight for their organizations, and prompting proactive planning and action to manage future risks.
This course combines industry standard best practices in futures studies with lessons learned from real world implementation. It is organized around the steps identified by the Association of Professional Futurists that support comprehensive strategic foresight analysis. It leverages standard taxonomies such as the Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political (STEEP) Framework, to help ensure an analytic foundation is established that is sound and justifiable. It introduces practical, proven stakeholder engagement methods, workshop designs, and facilitation techniques, to support successful implementation of a futures studies program in any organization or jurisdiction.
Example of Futures Studies:
Learning Objectives:
Terminal objective: By the end of this course, students will be able to describe and begin to implement the core features of futures studies, in order to help identify emerging trends in homeland security and consider how to take action to mitigate future risks and accelerate future benefits.
Enabling objectives:
- To describe the purpose and value of futures studies in a homeland security context
- To identify concrete methods that help orient stakeholders’ thinking toward the future
- To design a process that identifies the key drivers that will affect future strategic environments, through research and engagement with both internal and external stakeholders
- To summarize how to develop scenarios that are both plausible and exciting, to engage key subject matter experts
- To brainstorm practical applications of futures studies for a given program or organization
Module 1: Introduction
Module 2: Framing
Module 3: Scanning
Module 4: Forecasting
Module 5: Visioning
Module 6: Planning
Module 7: Acting
About the Instructor
Erin Mohres is the Director of the Center for Homeland Security and Infrastructure Resilience at the CNA Institute for Public Research and she is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM). She is a former emergency manager from South Florida and a former Visiting Professor at Lynn University. She has developed courses and taught students at all levels, most recently developing a series of four online training courses for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). She has also developed and taught courses for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and for state and local agencies across the country. She has been lead facilitator for many futures studies and strategic foresight activities, supporting all aspects of stakeholder engagement and scenario workshop planning and execution.