Welcome to SFI's home page.

Mission
Strategic Futures International (SFI) is a group of highly experienced professionals committed to advancing the state-of-the-art in strategic forecasting, planning, implementation, and assessment through specific, often complex, high-stakes assignments. SFI's mission is to apply this experience to enable clients to develop and exploit superior information about the future, internalize a shared understanding of its implications, and thereby manage more strategically to secure tomorrow's markets, opportunities, and performance.

Services
SFI's portfolio of services includes top-level strategic analysis, mission definition and re-assessment, environmental scanning, demographic and market research, competitive analysis, new product/service evaluation, operational and strategic forecasting and planning, strategic audits, financial analysis, merger and acquisition planning, corporate development analysis, and program and project evaluation. The SFI team has also been very active in management education and training, through SFI's own Futures Seminar, service on in-house faculties, and keynote speeches and workshops at professional meetings.

Approach
The foundation of SFI's services is a distinctive philosophy about how to manage change under uncertainty. It relies in part on a unique model of Applied Futures Research--a set of perspectives and techniques proven and steadily refined in decades of practical applications. Its essence involves working closely with each client to tackle problems in view of their full complexity, as they may evolve over time, taking account of the needs and expectations of all who may be affected by decisions the client may make--or leave unmade. It also requires careful evaluation of a wide range of such operational and policy choices against explicit criteria, typically within the context provided by realistic images of alternative futures. This model is, however, embedded in a larger context, where the emphasis on achieving serious research results is integrated with the equally serious requirement to consider the relevant organizational and behavioral realities. These features combine to produce what SFI calls the strategic futures approach.

Experience
SFI's principals know this approach intimately because they were among the pioneers who developed it and among the first to introduce it into business and government. Their experience over the better part of three decades includes years of service with the leading research and management consulting organizations in the field: The RAND Corporation, The Futures Group, the Institute for the Future, the Center for Futures Research at the University of Southern California, and the Hudson Institute.

Assignments
Under this team's leadership, SFI works in many fields. Past assignments have addressed major strategic issues in areas ranging from banking and insurance to health care, from electronic funds transfer to international trade, from information services to agriculture, from office automation to higher education, from energy policy to criminal justice, from retail marketing and distribution to political and military strategy.

Objectives
Common to these assignments is an emphasis on achieving four specific outcomes for SFI's clients:

• Developing strategic assumptions about the future that are sound--robust, authoritative, and relevant. This is where applied futures research comes in. The issue is knowledge. The aim is to avoid trivializing the future--and thereby to avoid unnecessary surprise.

• Identifying and evaluating a full array of policy options consistent with these assumptions and flexible enough to prevail in important alternative futures. This is where scenarios and other advanced methods come in. The issue is decisions about action. The aim is mission success.

• Involving the key internal and external players in this process, drawing systematically on their experience, knowledge, and insights. In working with outside stakeholders, the aim is to ensure that the viewpoints of customers, suppliers, and others about the need for change are captured and explicitly included in the process. In working with insiders, especially the core management team, the aim is make them true owners of the assumptions and policy options, and thus ensure strong, well-informed support for the plans based on them. The issue is managing strategically through a comprehensive and shared vision.

• Transferring SFI's distinctive approach and methodologies into the organization so that they too are owned and can be refined in subsequent planning cycles. Simply put, the aim is to re-engineer the strategic management process. The issue is survival, innovation, and growth . . . by design.

Methodologies
The literature makes it plain that simpler methods of futures-oriented research and analysis tend to produce better results than more complex ones. SFI strongly agrees, but recognizes that sensible applications of simpler methods must usually be highly detailed and intricate, if the future is not to be trivialized. Thus, while the names of some techniques SFI relies on most heavily--such as Delphi, cross-impact analysis, and scenario-writing--are the same as those used by others, SFI's actual designs and implementatons are quite different from common experience, consistent with SFI's commitment to push the state-of-the-art. Some of these differences are pinpointed in SFI's straight-ahead answers to certain Basic Questions.

Clients
Over the years, SFI's principals have worked with chief executives, as well as senior line and staff executives responsible for strategy development in areas such as marketing, new products and services, corporate and SBU planning, R&D, and human resources. These clients represent major financial, industrial, and retail corporations, associations, foundations, other consultancies, and agencies of government on all levels. A list is available on request.

Principals
SFI was founded by Wayne I. Boucher, who serves as Managing Partner, and Trevor A. Hunwicks, who is Managing Partner in the UK.

We would welcome the opportunity to discuss your needs.

For More Information	Applied Futures Research	Basic Questions	SFI's Futures Seminar
SFI's Newsletter	Principals	Other SFIs	Links to the Future

In the U.S.: 955 L'Enfant Plaza, N., S.W., Suite 4000, Washington, DC 20045Tel: Fax:
In the U.K.: 18th Floor, St. Alphage House, 2 Fore Street, London, EC2Y 5DATel: Fax: 0171 256 6930

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