Beginning in 2017, The City of Calgary’s Resilience & Infrastructure Calgary team established a Strategic Foresight program and initiated the development of a Future Focused Calgary strategy.

In 2020, as part of the Resilient Calgary strategy implementation and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Calgary worked with Creative Futures and Evergreen to develop a Future Focused Calgary Toolkit. The goal of this toolkit was to support future-informed decision-making across the corporation. It included an overview of strategic foresight, horizon scanning, a set of trends impacting the future of Calgary, draft 2035 scenarios and an approach for applying the scenarios to present day decision-making.

Given the continued breadth of changes created by COVID-19, the City of Calgary engaged Creative Futures in 2021 to update the toolkit, and further develop the set of 2035 scenarios. The goal of this project was to support further adoption of the toolkit across the corporation.

Our Approach:

• To ensure the toolkit design met the intended use, Creative Futures created a design brief. This document described the intended use and audience of the final products, as well as the overall tone, look and feel.

• Creative Futures engaged strategists, service line leaders and others from across the organization to contribute to the horizon scanning process and scenario development. This engagement built the capacity of teams to use foresight approaches, while also gathering their collective intelligence.

• Creative Futures developed a set of draft scenarios for testing with select City team members. For each scenario, an artifact of the future was described, to bring each scenario further to life. The scenarios were refined based on staff feedback.

• The final scenarios were graphically designed to increase accessibility and engagement of the scenarios. Additionally, a trends deck template was created to facilitate regular updating of the toolkit’s trends set.

• Lastly, Creative Futures developed a series of recommendations for how to continue refreshing trends and scenarios over time.

Results:

The City of Calgary continues to apply strategic foresight approaches to decision-making in a variety of domains. The toolkit supports its application, and further internal learning.