Change is happening all around us. Some changes are predictable with more certain outcomes; others are less predictable and highly uncertain. Strategic foresight helps us to anticipate and better prepares us for change. It is about exploring different futures, and the opportunities and challenges they could present. Those ideas are then used to act now to make better decisions and invest limited resources effectively.

For Calgary to have a resilient and prosperous future, we need better tools to engage with and consider numerous complex choices. To do this, we must have future-focused information and resources that will help us in the following:

• Be innovative, tech-savvy and future-focused.
• Be more agile to emerging stresses, shocks and opportunities.
• Identify strategic actions to achieve goals.

Business development is a vital part of a resilient economy, as such, there are many market attraction efforts underway in our city. Development and growth opportunities should be strategic and consider a resilience dividend that allows for a better understanding of short- and long-term benefits from across the City Resilience Framework, whether they are economic, social, or environmental.

Economic investments should be meeting strategic long-term needs. Doing this will:

• Improve the business case for investments opportunities.
• Ensure the capital outlay does not put the ability of the community to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations, at risk in the future.

In early April 2020, a future-focused Calgary project began in collaboration with Evergreen and Creative Futures to:

• Identify the complex range of changes that have the potential to impact the future of Calgary in the next 18 months to 15 years.
• Identify high-level actions to mitigate risk and inform our recovery efforts.
• Build strategic foresight capacity in the organization.

Through this project, the FYI Calgary Scan Club (Scan Club) launched and conducted a horizon scan to identify possible changes occurring and being accelerated that have the potential to impact Calgary. The scan was used to create four exploratory and plausible future scenarios:

• Continuation and growth - business as usual or “status quo” growth.
• Limits and discipline - implementation of behaviours to adapt to growing fiscal and environmental limits.
• Decline and collapse - system degradation and failure during escalating crisis.
• Transformation - new technology, business, or social factors that result in significant change.

The summary of trends and scenarios are available to the organization to identify opportunities, risks and gaps toward achieving policy or strategy outcomes. The application of these scenarios can identify opportunities, risks and gaps towards achieving targeted goals. This will enable The City to be nimble, innovative and future-focused to create a Calgary that is more resilient to stresses and shocks.