Ethos Perspectives
Emerging Strategic Issues and Wildcards
Identifying ESIs 2
 In developing a set of robust and wide-ranging ESIs, a key component is to generate as diverse a set of ideas as possible. Participants should be encouraged to reflect on, then look past their individual and professional cognitive biases, and actively research areas with which they were less familiar. The literature research done should span a wide range of material, from traditional journal publications and government reports to more fringe articles and blog posts will be helpful in.
Besides literature research, personal interviews will also add to the diversity of ideas. A broad range of perspectives from individuals with varied viewpoints and experiences, including decision-makers like politicians and senior civil servants, as well as non-government personalities: academics, non-governmental organisation representatives, thought leaders in different disciplines and private sector professionals, will help to augment research and provide fresh perspectives and insights.
Besides canvassing a wide variety of perspectives through face-to-face interviews, it would also be useful to vary methods of idea collection. Online conversations with subject matter experts and "synthesis thinkers" who help draw connections across seemingly disparate disciplines, can be carried out to expose the participants to a wider range of non-local views, without the logistics of a full study trip.
The set of online conversations conducted can each have a distinct emphasis. Participants can begin with an exploration of "what’s new" with synthesis thinkers across a diverse set of views before narrowing down the next conversation to a geographical or temporal emphasis. If specific blindspots or cognitive biases were identified in the first step for the participants, the online conversations could also be structured to identifying the social ramifications of the issues we were studying.
Through this initial phase, participants should gather a significant set of ideas that have possible relevance for the organisation. These can then be captured in an idea database for categorizing and tagging the ideas.
To facilitate the synthesis of ideas and allow for juxtaposition of insights, the ideas can be further selected and structured into Idea Cards. Each idea can be tagged as belonging to one or more particular category. The structured format of the Idea Cards will help keep track of and process the ideas that had been generated, as well as to draw connections across the broad range of topics covered in the ideas.
 The Idea Cards collected in the "Generating Ideas" step can be used to form the basis for the second step, "Articulating Emerging Issues". The original ideas can be synthesized into ESIs by exploring connections across categories and insights. This can be done through workshops deliberately structured to surface connections, common threads and consequences from the initial idea list.
These workshops should seek to articulate and develop a set of ESIs, and should involve broad thinkers that are skilled at establishing connections among ideas and drawing out insights. A key outcome of this step should also be to communicate the ESIs through clear, actionable messages to intended audiences.
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