Tackling the Geopolitics of Standardization: Lessons from Canada's Strategic Foresight-to-Standards Pilot Project

Abstract

Strategic foresight is the systematic exploration of emerging and future developments. Standardization is the process by which a common technical language is created and applied to new concepts and evolving technologies. Both strategic foresight and standardization address long-term technological change across industries, societies, and economies. And yet rarely are the two used in tandem to anticipate emerging standardization priorities that are critical to national interests. Against the backdrop of a global “technological race,” the foresight-to-standards process provides a novel approach to anticipate the nature of emerging technologies and their plausible influence on national, military, and economic interests, and to direct standardization efforts to align with strategic objectives. Our article provides an in-depth exploration of the Standards Council of Canada's experimentation with foresight between 2018 and 2021, informed by first-hand experience and observation. We describe and assess the SCC's use of strategic foresight in standardization, providing insights on capacity building, collaboration, leadership, decision making, and action.

Introduction: the foresight-standardization nexus

Strategic foresight is the systematic study of emerging and future challenges and opportunities. Standardization is the process by which a common technical language is created and applied to new concepts and evolving science and technologies. Both strategic foresight (which is often abbreviated as foresight) and standardization are forward-looking in their posture and address long-term technological change across industries, societies, and economies. They share a common perspective that links together emerging science and technology, the evolution of global markets and economics, and national and geopolitical considerations. And both can be understood as methodological tools useful to business leaders, technical experts, and policy decision-makers alike to help shape current and emerging considerations and strategic priorities at the nexus between emerging technology and national interests.

Historically, standards have functioned as a form of non-binding global regulation that helps to determine common technical specifications that facilitate product safety and interoperability, scientific progression, international trade, economic development and growth, and national security. ¹ In theory, standards are meant to be determined by their “technical merit,” as assessed by a group of stakeholders rather than the clout or coercion of any particular government or policy. ² But in practice, standards setting has long been an area of contestation that industry and states alike use to gain technological and economic advantages over others. ³ As Tim Rühlig argues, “as a central feature of technological advancement, standards are a source of national power, and they are an important factor in defining relative economic competitiveness.” ⁴

This sentiment is at the heart of the (so-called) “technology race” emerging today between the US, China, and their respective allies and partners. China's approach to standardization has evolved a great deal over the past decade, reflecting a more assertive global approach underpinned by “techno-nationalist” ambitions and a “first-mover” strategy vis-à-vis emerging and potentially disruptive technologies. ⁵ As Rühlig illustrates further, China approaches standardization within “the context of global competition” with the US and Europe, acknowledging the “immense relevance of technical standard-setting” to its long-term national, military, and economic ambitions and leveraging a “state-centric approach” to standardization to influence the process to its liking. ⁶ To counter, in May 2023 the White House published the National Standards Strategy (NSS) for Critical and Emerging Technology, in which Washington accuses the Chinese government of politicizing standardization in an effort to benefit local and friendly innovators and companies, all in keeping with Chinese national interests. China seeks to “undermine the integrity of longstanding standards development processes,” the US strategy reads, “pushing topdown approaches to dominate future markets and reinforce coercive leverage… [to] cajole or compel support for its standards proposals… [and] promotes prescriptive standards, irrespective of technical merit, designed solely to entrench market dominance.” ⁷ As Matt Sheehan and colleagues conclude, China's state-centric approach to standardization is meant to cultivate homegrown technologies and innovations by establishing advantageous global standards that can subsequently be used as a “lever for upgrading the country's industrial base.” ⁸

In response to the politicization of standardization, states friendly to the American position should cultivate the ability to better anticipate emerging and future scientific and technological developments, market and consumer trends, and the interaction between technology and geopolitics. The field of strategic foresight provides organizations active in standardization, industry, academia, and civil society with tools and techniques to help anticipate future standardization needs in relation to emerging science and technology that in turn can feed into long-term national objectives and goals. Better integrating elements of strategic foresight to national standardization efforts could help governments fine-tune their standards and accreditation objectives by better identifying future technological challenges and opportunities while leveraging and securing national, military, and economic interests. Moreover, for countries like Canada, whose economies are largely dependent on maintaining steady trade relations, aligning current, emerging, and future standards with those of key trading partners should be a national and strategic priority.

Unfortunately, foresight is rarely systematically applied to standardization, despite the benefits of doing so. Furthermore, scholars of policy foresight have themselves largely failed to contemplate or evaluate how this research method might inform the standards-making process. We set out to correct both deficiencies. Providing an in-depth narrative-informed exploration of foresight's application within the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), our paper reflects insights, observations, and reflections from activities that took place there between November 2018 and November 2021. ⁹ Our objective is to provide a Canadian case study of a recent experiment in leveraging foresight methodologies to standardization against a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty. Like other published case studies of foresight applications within public policy, our goal is to inform readers of foresight's practical use and utility. ¹⁰ Our observations aid in understanding how foresight has penetrated the wider Canadian public service, and compare lessons from the Canadian perspective to other international applications of foresight to standardization.

The paper is structured in four sections. It begins with a summary of strategic foresight as applied within the Canadian federal public service, and a description of Canada's emerging ecosystem of policy foresight within which the SCC sits. Section two then turns to a broader discussion of the global foresight-standardization nexus, highlighting both national and multilateral initiatives. Turning back to Canada, section three provides a detailed account of the SCC's recent experience experimenting with and applying foresight to standards and accreditation, with a focus on describing efforts related to foresight training and capacity building, national and international collaboration, leadership, decision-making, and action. Section four, functioning as the paper's conclusion, describes a series of lessons learned from the SCC's foresight-to-standards process, providing context for future research on and application of foresight and standardization, and drawing observations on the contemporary nature of geopolitical and technological competition.

Canadian foresight: emerging considerations, recent developments

Strategic foresight is both a speculative endeavor and a rigorous methodology of research. It provides a guide and process for taking contemporary observations and extrapolating their consequence outwards and into the future. ¹¹ As a form of analysis, strategic foresight is usually punctuated by different and cascading research steps. Most foresight begins with some form of table-setting exercise, like a domain map or other framing process, that helps define the question or topic under study. Scanning, the identification of insights, and the development of change drivers usually follow next. Here, contemporary data informing the nature and scope of emerging change are collected, providing a snapshot of a probable future. ¹² This empirical material is often then explored and analyzed in greater detail using any number of different techniques, including influence diagrams and cascades or implication wheels. These tools compel analysts to posit, explore, and record how contemporary developments might logically and causally unfold in the near and far future. In essence, at this step in the process analysts are pushing a weak signal of contemporary change into the future to capture how that weak signal, were it eventually to grow in importance, might affect change within the system or systems under review in new and surprising ways. Finally, many foresight projects make use of scenarios to chart out the domain's alternative futures. ¹³ Scenarios let analysts imagine how they and their organizations might respond to a variety of competing circumstances. Here, foresight dips into strategic planning as a way to gauge and evaluate the continued and future value of contemporary planning principles, assumptions, strategies, and policies. At this point, foresight's speculative and rigorous halves meet, ultimately inviting users to explore their institutional and decision-making responses to emerging opportunities and challenges. ¹⁴

Set in the context of national and defence policy, Thinking about the Unthinkable (1962), written by Herman Kahn, considered a founder of strategic foresight, ¹⁵ argues that governments have a moral responsibility to think beyond the most probable future trajectory, to push the boundaries of our collective imagination, and to dare to explore the future in various, and at times uncomfortable, ways. ¹⁶ Kahn's application of foresight to geopolitics took place against a backdrop with characteristics similar to today's context: an emerging Cold War pitted the world's two mightiest military and economic superpowers against one another, punctuated by the development and proliferation of new dual-use and military technologies, and culminating in the threatened use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets. Kahn argued that exploring “how a war might be fought” ¹⁷ in the near and far term was not only a moral duty but a necessity for shaping a mutually preferred future without war. Beyond the study and practice of conflict, foresight is equally attuned to considering other aspects of national, domestic, or economic interests. Our ability to contemplate the future is tied to our ability to mitigate or prevent undesirable future developments while supporting and cultivating desirable ones. Foresight serves as “an aid to the imagination.” ¹⁸

Within Canada, strategic foresight is applied across the federal public service by several government departments, institutions, and agencies to explore a range of alternative thematic futures, from the adoption and use of AI in the collection and analysis of intelligence, to the rise (and fall) of populism, to the development of net-zero agricultural production, and everything in between. In fact, since 2015, Canada's foresight landscape has expanded a great deal. ¹⁹ This pace of development quickened significantly starting in 2020 and 2021, in large part because of the combined disruptive effects of the COVID-19 global pandemic, Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, and geopolitical uncertainty related to global climate change, alongside the concomitant risks these crises may have on the future of conflict, global trade, energy, food security, democracy, human rights, and the rules-based international order.

At the center of Canada's foresight ecosystem lies Policy Horizons Canada (referred to as Horizons), the government's longstanding center for foresight. Horizons has the mandate and means to think big over the span of decades, largely untethered from the everyday challenges of governance and policy-making. Beyond Horizons, several Canadian government foresight units and groups have emerged: formal capacity for foresight currently exists, for instance, at Global Affairs Canada, Defence Research and Development Canada, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada Border Services Agency, National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, Department of Justice, Public Health Agency of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada Revenue Agency, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and International Development Research Centre. These foresight teams are usually made up of between two and four analysts and are often located within a department's strategic policy branch, research division, or innovation shop. Their focus is specifically and narrowly tied to their department's core mandates, and often their foresight activities are near term, in the range of five to ten years into the future. Put simply, most of these Canadian government organizations seek to develop enough foresight capacity to feed specific departmental planning needs in the medium and long terms. ²⁰ And yet, these disparate units and teams share a common goal: to better inform Canada's current and future policies into the next decade(s).

The SCC, a small Crown corporation, sits within this burgeoning foresight ecosystem. It provided over 50 percent of its personnel with foresight training opportunities while likewise launching experiments linking foresight to standardization and accreditation. What follows next is a detailed description of how the SCC and other standardization bodies have recently experimented with and used foresight.

Foresight in standardization: national and international perspectives

Innovation, invention, and foresight go hand in hand. Strategic foresight helps anticipate and imagine plausible long-term futures; it helps organizations think about Kahn's unthinkable scenarios. Whereas innovation is “the process of taking new ideas and devising new or improved products or services,” invention, argues Dan Breznitz, can be described as “the process of coming up with a truly novel idea.” ²¹ Methods in strategic foresight help us imagine plausible futures, whereas innovation and invention are some of the processes that make these futures a reality. Standardization plays a key role throughout the innovation process and can support innovation from basic research through to commercialization. ²² Furthermore, as Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian suggest, “standardization is one of the key factors determining the pace and direction of adoption and [diffusion] of information technologies.” ²³ Julia Baron and Justus Schmidt demonstrate further that since standardization is key to prompting technology diffusion, the commencement of standardization activities in a field serves as a market signal for future market developments. ²⁴ Paying attention to national and international standardization systems is therefore key to understanding the evolution of science and technology, and to determining the emerging products and services that will shape our collective future. While standardization has been long thought of as existing near or at the end of the innovation process, over the past decade, innovation programs across the globe have demonstrated the value of integrating standardization considerations at the very beginning of the process. Knut Blind illustrates the various stages of innovation in relation to the types of standards that can help move an innovation from inception and idea to full market integration and public use. ²⁵ As such, various types of standards can serve as indicators of technological progress and readiness. They also inform of the nature of change in geopolitical competition and national power. This shift in perspective is evident at both the international and national levels.

On the international stage there are a number of initiatives aimed at anticipating future standardization needs. Global standardization bodies have a unique vantage point on the development of new technologies. With a horizontal view of several systems and fields that they serve, they can efficiently mobilize a large amount of technical expertise to make connections across disciplines and technical fields. This benefit is evident among major international standardization organizations, including, for instant, at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO; pronounced “eye-soh”), with a membership of 167 countries and over 45,000 active experts, ²⁶ and at the International Electrotechnical Committee (IEC), with a membership of eighty-eight IEC National Committees and close to 20,000 experts. ²⁷ These organizations have access to a vast number of technical experts from all over the world in over seventeen technical sectors, covering a wide range of standardization areas. ²⁸ This unique capability allows these organizations to tap vast amounts of knowledge and ensure the standards and conformity assessment required for emerging technologies are being properly developed. The technical committee structure and grassroots standard development process allows for new ideas and technologies to enter the system organically through subject matter experts in their respective fields. To complement the grassroots evolution of standards, governance committees or specialized units have been created and tasked with horizontal scanning and evaluation of emerging needs. Four international examples stand out.

First, in 2019, ISO established the Research and Innovation Unit. The unit's mandate included the coordination of research, foresight, and education among national standards bodies (NSB) who are ISO members and key stakeholders in the field of standardization. ²⁹ The research function was entrusted with facilitating, funding, and leading research on the impact of international standards more broadly. Within the context of research and innovation, the unit had a mandate concentrating on foresight and was tasked with identifying emerging areas where international standards would be needed. The education mandate was added to the unit later and included the promotion of standards in academic curricula.

With respect to the innovation and foresight work, the unit developed a Standardization Foresight Framework to support the systematic contemplation of long-term horizons and their implications for the ISO system. ³⁰ Before establishing the framework, the team conducted a membership survey and consultation to understand the scope of use of foresight and innovation. The first foresight report identified key trends along the Social, Technology, Economic, Environmental, Political, and Values (STEEP-V) categories that are likely to shape the future. ³¹ A comprehensive mapping of technical committees and standards relevant to these future trends will help chart progress in various fields. The report was conceptualized with the intention of supporting the priorities set in the ISO Strategy 2030. Here we see that the practice of foresight is directly related to the strategy function of the organization and is designed to support its implementation. The report is also used as a communication and engagement tool to signal stakeholders of the value-added and forward-looking orientation of the organization. Furthermore, the head of the Research and Innovation Unit reported directly to ISO's secretary-general, creating a direct link to the highest executive function in the organization. As a result of connecting ISO's foresight work with its organizational strategy, contemplation about the future now triggers open conversations and debates about the future relevancy of the organization itself in the coming decade, and on the evolving needs of users of international standards more broadly. ³² Foresight, then, has led to deep institutional introspection.

Second, consider the IEC, which formed the Market Strategy Board (MSB) as part of its governance structure in 2008. It has been publishing reports on various forward-looking technologies since 2010. ³³ The aim of the MSB is to help identify and assess emerging and future trends, market needs, and their implications to standard development and conformity assessment in the electrotechnical fields. One particularly pertinent example is the MSB's adoption of foresight research related to the concept of biodigital convergence. The topic itself can be directly traced back to the IEC's participation in the SCC's strategic foresight training and capacity-building initiative in November 2019 (as described below). The training initiative included the exposure to and use of foresight reports and methodologies from Canadian and international sources. These included weak signals related to recent and novel research on the convergence between biological and digital processes as proposed and later developed by Policy Horizons Canada. ³⁴ Furthermore, the successful nomination of Horizon's leadership to serve on IEC's MSB in 2020 facilitated the transfer of knowledge from the national arena of foresight research to the international stage. Indeed, the concept of a biodigital convergence could eventually lead to dramatic change across several disruptive technologies being proposed and developed around the world. As these technologies develop, standardization can provide the tools needed to facilitate integration, interoperability, safety and security, management systems, and ethics considerations. As a result, the IEC formed a System Evaluation Group (SEG) on Biodigital Convergence (SEG 12) in 2021. In 2023, the SEG 12 recommended the formation of a Systems Committee Bio-Digital Convergence (SyC BDC), which was ratified by member states. ³⁵ Here again is a direct link between foresight research and international standardization, and an illustration of how foresight can influence and impact technological development on the global stage.

Third, as in many other sectors, the onset of COVID-19 forced the accreditation sector–which provides standardization-related services–to innovate in its approach to conducting conformity assessments, testing, inspection, verification, and certification. Indeed, research by Merih Malmqvist Nilsson outlines the various ways that conformity assessment, testing, and verification practices need to evolve to better address and meet future needs. ³⁶ During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, limits on in-person services required the development of new approaches, spurring conformity assessment bodies to experiment with new service delivery models, such as the ones originally envisions by Malmqvist Nilson in 2019.

Fourth, in winter 2023, NATO held its second workshop, “NATO Use of Civil Standards.” The workshop's goal was to raise awareness among NATO members about the important opportunities, challenges, risks, and threats of adopting civil standards related to emerging and disruptive technologies in defence. Throughout the workshop, the NATO Advisory Group on Emerging and Disruptive Technologies Annual Report was referenced in relation to present and long-term impacts of various emerging technologies and standardization in allied defence and civilian contexts. ³⁷

At the state level, NSB and accreditation bodies around the world have been developing ways to align standardization systems with emerging technologies and to better anticipate the standardization needs of the future. ³⁸ For example, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a collaborative methodology to explore emerging technologies and identify gaps in standardization. ANSI's efforts have resulted in improved gap analysis, a road map to future technologies, a process to measure and track the fulfillment of identified gaps (e.g., Unmanned Aircraft Systems Collaborative, Additive Manufacturing Standardization Collaborative), ³⁹ and better coordination among various stakeholders in each domain.

Consider, too, the German Institute for Standardisation's (DIN) approach for identifying emerging fields that will require greater standardization. ⁴⁰ The German methodology involved conducting a scientometric review of patents and scientific publications, developing innovation indicators, and running Delphi (i.e., iterative interview) surveys. The combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches demonstrates the opportunities for developing and using a systematic approach for identifying emerging and future needs in German standardization. And yet, unlike Canada's approach, the German model does not appear to combine the foresight efforts conducted piecemeal by the national standards body and other German public service entities active in foresight. As will become evident in our SCC case study that follows, the multidisciplinary nature of emerging and disruptive technologies requires a system-wide foresight response, able to better facilitate and coordinate research among various organizations, both within each state and among the global standardization ecosystem.

SCC foresight: building capacity, leveraging relationships

The SCC was established in 1970 by the Canadian federal government under the Standards Council of Canada Act. ⁴¹ The SCC reports to the Canadian parliament through the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, highlighting SCC's close link to Canada's economic agenda. ⁴² One of the gaps the Canadian parliament sought to address through the establishment of the SCC was the lack of coordination and long-term planning in Canada's then fragmented standardization approach. The assessment identified the need for coordination and long-term planning in Canadian standardization and recommended the establishment of SCC as a remedy. From its inception, then, Canadian legislators understood the need for integrating short- and long-term thinking within SCC's mandate and role to the benefit of Canadian national, geopolitical, and economic interests.

Globally, the SCC is a unique national standardization body, for several reasons. First, it oversees the whole standardization system, from standards to accreditation. Second, it rests at arm's length from the government, providing it with the agility to quickly respond to market, social, and government needs and priorities. Third, when it comes to standards, the SCC's role is one of coordination, facilitation, and oversight; it does not, in fact, develop standards as many other NSB do. Fourth, SCC's role in representing Canada at ISO and IEC is outlined in its Act, signaling the importance of these two international organizations to Canada's standardization system.

As an organization that sits at the nexus between governance, trade, innovation, science, sustainable development, health, consumer safety, and worker welfare, long-term thinking and future visioning is central to SCC. Its broad mandate reflects the horizontal nature of standardization: the assessment of standards and conformity touches almost every aspect of human lives and is a linchpin to the proper functioning of national and international economies. To ensure the system is responsive to the evolving needs of Canadians as well as emerging technologies and a changing global order, the SCC has developed various approaches to embody its mandate and ensure the system evolves over time. Since 2017, for instance, the SCC has implemented the following programs and tools:

In 2017, SCC launched the Innovation Initiative, which was later expanded into the Innovation and IP Program, a time-limited program funded by the federal government. This market-led initiative targets companies who encounter market access challenges that can be addressed by adopting standardization strategies. Between 2017 and 2022, the program helped solve over sixty-three standardization challenges in areas of emerging and strategically important technologies, including quantum computing, green/clean technologies, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. ⁴³

In 2019, SCC launched its first collaborative, the Canadian Data Governance Standardization Collaborative, bringing together stakeholders from industry, academia, government, consumer groups, and civil society to address emerging needs in the digital economy. ⁴⁴ Aiming to increase the SCC's impact on sector-level change, the collaborative was modeled on ANSI's methodology, focusing on data governance as a foundational element of the national and international current and future digital economy. The collaborative resulted in a comprehensive road map, use cases, and compendium of standards related to data governance. ⁴⁵ As of 2022, the SCC has initiated other collaboratives, including on mental health and AI, which should result in the development of gap analysis and standardization road maps. ⁴⁶ One of the main impacts of these engagements is consensus-building across stakeholders in a sector or domain.

In 2021, in response to technology's rapid evolution, the SCC launched new standardization deliverables. Early-stage technologies, for illustration, can now use other standardization products than the traditional National Standard of Canada. ⁴⁷ These tools include workshop agreements and community document databases that bring together disparate experts and knowledge about a specific technological domain.

In 2022, Canada published its NSS designed to systematically engage key stakeholders across the Canadian standardization system and identify emerging and futures areas of need and priority. The NSS's stated mission is to “anticipate the diverse needs of Canadian society, and effectively promote Canadian interests at the international level.” ⁴⁸

Canada's approach to tracking emerging technologies and identifying emerging standardization needs has been based on the development and application of a variety of tools that combine market-led initiatives with nationally driven perspectives on geopolitical developments. Within this context of experimentation and deployment of tools to advance innovation and early identification of technologies, the SCC's strategic foresight initiative was developed in 2019. This included a strategic foresight lab, designed as an experimental space where foresight methodologies, techniques, and tools could be tested and leveraged across the organization. Spanning the corporate planning, accreditation, standards, and strategy functions, the SCC's foresight lab was tasked with helping the organization ensure that its national and international activities remained relevant to Canadians and Canada's long-term national interests. From an operational perspective, the lab's activities informed programmatic areas of evolving needs and priorities that had future implications. What follows is a description of how the SCC's foray into foresight unfolded.

SCC's foresight building blocks

SCC's approach to strategic foresight was developed against the backdrop of supporting Canadian innovation with a forward-looking strategy. At the core of this process was a deep-seated willingness to experiment with new methodologies and research approaches. Thinking about long-term futures is an activity well aligned with the mandate, structure, and processes of the standardization system. While standard development times have decreased significantly over the years, in the past it was not uncommon that the development of a formal international or national standard of Canada took several years to complete. This meant that the standard itself, once published, would need to remain relevant over a further period of three to five years. Therefore, there was an inherent requirement to think about future needs in the range of a decade from when a standard was designed and developed. Doing so required a degree of foresight.

Today, these long-winded timelines are no longer sufficient. ⁴⁹ Technological innovation moves far too quickly. Standard development organizations and NSBs are required to find novel ways for the standardization system to match the rapid evolution of emerging technologies. Time frames have shrunk dramatically. The result is a range of new types of standardization tools that allow the standardization system to better align with the innovation process, by allowing the agility required in early stages of technological development and facilitating the benefits of knowledge sharing and alignment across new fields. ⁵⁰ A forward-looking orientation is also evident in other strategic planning processes across Canada's public sector. Crown corporations, like the SCC, are obliged to produce an annual corporate plan. The plan typically follows key strategic planning modules (e.g., trends, operational environment, SWOT analysis, setting strategic priorities and objectives for the years ahead) and looks ahead within the one-to-five-year range. Foresight provided SCC with an opportunity to contemplate and explore the future, beginning at the five-year range and continuing into the decade.

SCC's strategic foresight initiative was developed within this context of searching for better ways to lead long-term coordination and planning, establishing a proactive and forward-looking corporate strategy and creating an agile and responsive system to address the standardization needs of rapidly evolving science and technology domains with global importance. Employing a building-blocks approach, the foresight initiative began as a collaboration among employees and senior management. The main impetus for developing a strategic foresight capability at the SCC was to help ensure that Canada's standardization network would be prepared for future disruption. Three sub-objectives were likewise defined:

Integrate and ensure long-term futures and potential impacts are considered when defining and informing the SCC's risk management, strategic plan, and operations at all levels and across branches;

Enable and facilitate horizontal and vertical knowledge integration and insight sharing about various futures within the SCC to fuel innovation and new ideas;

Systematically inform the SCC's corporate strategy and maximize its potential impacts.

Engaging employees in creating a culture of innovation was also an implicit objective throughout the formation of the initiative. To achieve the goals set for the strategic foresight initiative, several activities took place. A description of each follows.

Executive leadership

Generating new ideas within an organization is key to continuous growth and development. ⁵¹ However, generating new ideas is not enough. Organizations need to ensure that the right building blocks exist to create a space where ideas can grow and flourish. Often new and innovative initiatives require an executive champion, leadership commitment, and buy-in from the top. At SCC, the foresight initiative was conceptualized in an informal encounter at the corporate kitchen (literally) between employees eager to learn more and human resources leadership. The informal role of the corporate kitchen as a safe space for conversations and contemplations about the system allowed further engagement and input from employees and executives from across the organization in the preliminary stages of the foresight initiative. This encounter led to a grassroots collaboration between executives and employees.

While SCC foresight originated from a learning and development initiative started by employees alongside the human resources function of the organization, the value of the methodology was quickly identified and championed by the CEO. This enabled the staff involved at the grassroots level to continue their experimentation, research, and ideation around how to better incorporate foresight within SCC to the benefit of all Canadians. In essence, executive leadership created a sandbox for learning and experimentation with various approaches and methods, including strategic foresight.

Organizational development and internal governance

Leadership is foundational, but not sufficient for foresight's success. Ensuring that organizational structures and management systems are aligned and integrated is a critical feature of successfully launching new initiatives, including in strategic foresight. ⁵² Many foresight units across the Canadian federal government are often located within a research or innovation unit, rather than a planning unit. ⁵³ The rationale is that purposefully tucking away foresight teams from where near-term discussions and decision-making take place will provide the freedom (and protection) that the teams need to launch speculative, no-strings-attached projects about the far future without the risk of being captured by contemporary policy demands, stale institutional assumptions, and static thinking. The risk, however, of this arrangement is that information from strategic foresight activities may not reach the senior management level within strategic planning shops. Distance from decision making may provide foresight its freedom, but it also risks breeding neglect. The result is that foresight may have few avenues to actually inform or influence policy and planning. This paradox resonated at the SCC.

The SCC's foresight emerged organically within a research team. And yet, this team was tasked with measuring the impact of standards and monitoring key performance indicators on the system and with various other research projects from across the organization. As a result, the team created a unique skill set and had a knowledge base of the entire standardization enterprise, allowing it to function as a hub able to piece together a fuller picture of the evolution of the system while identifying emerging domestic and international changes, challenges, and opportunities. At the time, the research team was also part of the SCC's Corporate Secretary and Communications Branch, where, by design, it had close relations with the corporate strategy function and corporate secretary and, hence, the governing council. This relationship facilitated the exchange and input of foresight findings directly to key strategic documents, such as the annual review of the operational environment section of the corporate plan, and the risk registry. The research team function was later shifted, however, to the SCC's Strategy and Stakeholder Engagement Branch, allowing the team to be further integrated into emerging needs expressed by stakeholders and strategy formation. While this structure allowed for additional grassroots collaboration, a gap nonetheless emerged between leadership and the foresight content that was being developed.

In 2020, the SCC's CEO created a new position and role, the special advisor to the CEO. The person hired to the special advisor position was also the person leading the foresight function. Due to the leadership and momentum of the initiative, the foresight function effectively became part of the office of the CEO. Foresight and experimentation also aligned with the CEO's vision for the role of the special advisor. This role allowed the CEO to extend her capacity and create space for exploration, experimentation, thought leadership, and advancement of key priorities, during a time of high uncertainty and rapid global change. It also opened the space and opportunity to bring strategic foresight activities closer to the executive management team, while maintaining its (necessary) grassroots origins and independence. In the new role and under the leadership and vision of the CEO, the special advisor was able to advance a series of foresight activities that helped orient and position the organization towards the future. These included continuing the strategic foresight lab, completing the development of a prototype of a weak signal database and collection tool, co-hosting cross-organizational assumption generating workshops with all SCC employees and integrating related findings into the corporate planning process, and co-designing foresight-oriented executive management retreats through the office of the CEO. The CEO's office also collaborated with other foresight organizations in Canada, including Horizons, in order to tap into thought leadership from across the federal government. Executive leadership from the CEO enabled the organization to systematically engage in long-term conversations about the future and resulted in the creation of a long-term vision, a guiding north star, providing SCC the ability to navigate its progress over time. Through the exploration of strategic foresight, the executive team accepted the necessity of moving beyond contemplating the expected five-year future alone, and learned the value of experimentation and continuous learning as part of building the SCC's desired short, medium, and long-term future. ⁵⁴ This aligned perfectly with the SCC's understanding of and work on innovation. The result was the development of a hackathon (Growing Ideas at SCC), ⁵⁵ an internal innovation forum, and a self-serve innovation toolkit for teams across the organization to use to leverage design thinking and foresight techniques.

Another key process was leveraged to ensure long-term thinking became explicitly integrated into the organization's very DNA: the Quality Management System (QMS). An organization's QMS outlines all its processes: their purpose, what they entail, who is responsible for their implementations, and how they ought to be implemented. These are captured in a set of policies, standard operating procedures, and job aids. Embedding a foresight function within an organization's QMS is one way to institutionalize and ensure its integration with other key functions and processes, such as corporate planning, training and development, and operations. The process of integrating foresight activities in an organization's QMS helps identify the functional areas and processes where foresight activities will provide the highest benefits, and strategically identify the key positions that are required to fully realize those benefits. At the SCC the seeds of this function were created within the internal governance committee structure and captured in the associated QMS documentation, where the responsibility over the long-term future of the organization was explicitly articulated as part of the executive management committee's roles and responsibilities. The corporate planning, performance measurement, and risk management functions were also identified as a set of key processes that could leverage foresight products and research. This process of integration with the corporate planning function led to an organization-wide series of workshops exploring vulnerable contemporary assumptions about the SCC, standardization, and geopolitics. ⁵⁶ These assumptions were later integrated into the strategic planning process and council discussions and informed the annual corporate plan and the NSS. The ability of an organization to mobilize foresight knowledge to inform decision-making and action, as SCC has done, is key to ensuring that foresight proves useful.

Training and capacity building

Over 50 percent of SCC's employees (i.e., sixty sixindividuals) received training in foresight methodology. A dozen or so employees of different ranks from across the organization's branches were grouped together, creating several multifunctional learning groups. Each group took part in a multi-day foresight training workshop. The overarching theme of each workshop was the future of the standardization system. This format allowed employees to learn the foresight approach used by other Government of Canada foresight units while integrating and leveraging the SCC employees’ vast knowledge of standardization and accreditation. Moreover, as each group included participants ranging from junior analysts to senior managers and executives, the workshops created a space where cross-organizational debate and discussion about the future of the system from various vantages could be shared.

The training also resulted in a series of products and deliverables that helped SCC employees better integrate their thinking about the future into the organization's functions. These products included several system and domain maps; comprehensive lists of contemporary assumptions about innovation, science, geopolitics, and standardization; a series of weak signals, insights, and change drivers; dozens of impact diagrams (in the form of influence cascades and influence diagrams); and various alternative future scenarios. In sum, the workshops provided an innovative and interactive space where employees could share and explore topics, themes, and subjects beyond the scope of their everyday analysis. Exposure to C-suite thinking alongside grassroots initiatives increased the level of participant engagement while providing a team-building experience that further reiterated SCC's open culture.

Strategic foresight lab

Building on the value of vertical and horizontal brainstorming about the future among all employees, the SCC launched its foresight lab in 2019. The SCC lab functioned as a scanning roundtable: each 90-min session was punctuated by four short presentations describing individual weak signals or insights. Following these presentations, participants were invited to identify and contemplate first, second, and third order impacts, to highlight policy and strategic implications for Canada, and to suggest further actions needed in the short term. These exercises helped the SCC contemplate emerging and future challenges and opportunities on a range of issues pertinent to Canadian national and economic interests.

The lab became a space of contemplation about the future, useful for learning about emerging technologies and trends, and for understanding the broader evolution of the system under exploration. The labs exposed participants to new and multidisciplinary intersections and opportunities for standardization to help resolve market, social, environmental, and technological challenges. For example, one scanning session resulted in the identification of new intersections between ethics and emerging technologies, and the role standardization can play. While the lab was a high-cost encounter, when considering the time employees spent during each event, the benefits spilled over beyond the traditional areas of foresight. The lab sessions that took place once a quarter included between 30 and 40 percent of all SCC employees. This participation rate suggested a high level of employee engagement and desire to contribute and learn about elements related to the future of the organization. The labs also provided employees of all ranks from across the organization with an opportunity to lead a discussion, and participating executives with a chance to hear directly from the ground level, diminishing institutional stovepipes. And anecdotally, the lab contributed to strengthening SCC's organizational culture and employee commitment. Beyond that, leveraging foresight tools to co-imagine plausible futures and contemplate their consequence on and for the SCC and Canadians allowed the organization to engage in various informal and formal conversations about the future of standardization from the perspective of Canadian society.

Overall, while the labs provided a space for experimentation, opportunities for improvement and learning presented themselves. For instance, the organization struggled with finding an effective and efficient way to operationalize the foresight labs, and some employees struggled with fully understanding the technologies under discussion. And yet, foresight is a skillset that is built, refined, and improved over time. In conjunction with the foresight training, SCC's scanning and foresight labs empowered and invited employees to think about and participate in key strategic conversations that had been traditionally reserved for senior management and the executive team.

National and international collaboration

The SCC's role in facilitating the horizontal development and integration of standards and conformity assessment in Canada requires that it work closely with other programs and activities across the federal government. The SCC's foresight initiative adopted that approach, too. At the national level, building foresight relationships across the Government of Canada's departments and agencies allowed the SCC to share and learn best practices from across the public service; provide input into other departments’ foresight studies and practices, including at Horizons, Natural Resources Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Global Affairs; and raise collective awareness of the role the standardization system has in securing Canadian interests. These cross-government engagements further allowed the SCC to integrate its domestic foresight work to its international foresight work conducted alongside global partners. As Canada's representative at ISO and IEC, the SCC has collaborated with both organizations on various foresight initiatives. For example, by sharing foresight knowledge and products with its international partners, and building up mutual foresight capacity, the SCC helped inform the formation of the IEC's System Evaluation Group on Biodigital Convergence. As previously noted, this international committee explored the future standardization needs of emerging technologies that will leverage and integrate both digital and biological technologies and systems. ⁵⁷

The SCC's domestic and international foresight partnerships suggest that Canadian foresight practitioners have an important role to play in mobilizing foresight knowledge by connecting disparate policymakers and research themes together so that insights about long-term change can be useful to the larger decision-making process. In the SCC's case, where funding for the foresight initiative was limited, the ability to form knowledge networks across the federal government helped reduce the financial burden of launching foresight from scratch. It allowed the SCC to leverage work already done by other foresight groups and to focus on the analysis and implications of these findings for the standardization system. This knowledge was then elevated to the international stage, ensuring that key standardization organizations like ISO and IEC remained cognizant of relevant change and potentially surprising alternative futures. The sum result is the further embedding of Canadian perspectives into the international standardization process with long-term benefits to Canadian national and economic interests.

Conclusion: lessons from Canada's foresight-to-standards approach

Foresight helps anticipate future challenges and opportunities; standardization helps turn future considerations into reality. Though the two processes—foresight and standardization—are not often paired together, their purposes are cross-cutting: to anticipate and safeguard a state's national, economic, and innovation agenda against a backdrop of geopolitical complexity and uncertainty. The SCC's initiative provides important insights on developing and applying foresight across the standardization and public policy landscape. Functioning as a conclusion, what follows are high-level insights culled from the SCC's experience, useful to other standardization bodies and public policy organizations at the national and international level and, more broadly, to applying, testing, and refining the foresight-to-standards approach within the emerging technological race.

First, implementing strategic foresight can be done on various scales to fit the size of the standardization body. Key ingredients for successful implementation, however, seem to include executive buy-in; sustained grassroots leadership, sponsorship, and support; integration of practice to the organization's internal governance structure; and cultivating and engaging a forward-looking culture focused on continuous learning and collaboration between all levels. Connecting with a network of other, external foresight practitioners appears to further help mobilize knowledge about foresight and demystify the methodology itself. These networks help broaden foresight capacity, particularly among smaller standardization organizations, and enable critical reflection on novel information and insights provided by the diverse worldviews and experiences of external stakeholders.

Second, the use of foresight helps ensure that national and international standardization systems continue to evolve and support the functions they were created to serve. In the case of the SCC this includes strengthening “Canada's competitiveness and social well-being.” ⁵⁸ Standardization has a key role to play in advancing innovation and moving science and technology from basic research through to commercialization in the partial service of national and economic interests. A country's ability to anticipate developments in critical areas of science, technology, and innovation will prove vital to its short- and long-term competitiveness. As a result, deploying strategic foresight capabilities across standardization bodies will help inform a country's long-term success. Forward-looking and proactive standardization systems help meet public policy objectives. If the main engine of national prosperity is innovation, then countries need to ensure that their standardization systems are progressing with (and potentially directing the future of) the global economy. This can have implications in various areas of public policy, including national defence and security, environmental policy, economic competitiveness, natural resources management, public health, and consumer safety.

Third, the international standardization system is rapidly evolving. It is a system with relatively low barriers to entry; new consortia, national bodies, and other organizations are regularly established. Collaboration among these various players may provide more benefits to all, including by speeding up the standardization process and otherwise ensuring interoperability and co-evolution among disparate entities. Strategic foresight can help international standardization organizations clearly identify their visions and evolving operating environments while making sense of contemporary and future geopolitical risk, uncertainty, and conflict. Combined with portfolio management techniques and continuous learning, these organizations will be able to better innovate and evolve their standardization systems in line with market needs, global trends, and national priorities.

Fourth, foresight practitioners are key to enabling and communicating the value of the foresight process across any organization, from executives to junior analysts alike. These individuals can serve as foresight knowledge brokers, translators, and mobilizers within and across the organization and can help move their organizations to a desired and plausible future scenario. They also can play an important role in identifying the most useful foresight techniques and translating these techniques to fit the needs and capacity of the organization itself. Foresight practitioners can help identify weak signals of change and facilitate a conversation about their implications for an organization. Their role is both horizontal and vertical as it touches the work of every part of an organization, including its governance bodies, executive management, corporate planning, risk management, strategy, and research.

Fifth, foresight and innovation facilitate the movement from contemplation to action. The connection between foresight, innovation, and invention was outlined earlier in the paper. The importance, utility, and impact of foresight is often debated, however, among foresight experts, scholars, and practitioners. ⁵⁹ The impact of foresight is often difficult to measure, as results may only become evident decades after foresight research was first implemented. This is particularly true in the public policy context, when priorities may change each election cycle, where employee turnover is relatively high, and when institutional knowledge is often lost as a result. Measures of the impact of foresight activities are often buried in anecdotes, narratives, conversations, relationships, and interactions, ephemeral developments that may not resonate with traditional indicators of policy or research success. Our paper is an attempt to document some of these forces of subtle change in the context of a public sector organization and vis-à-vis their corresponding impact on public policy, with the hope of further developing foresight measures of success, importance, and impact.

Finally, this paper lays the groundwork for connecting science, technology, and innovation together with standardization and foresight. Additional theoretical research is needed to develop appropriate frameworks around integrating these elements within organizations and across systems and ecosystems, providing insights for policymakers on how to leverage various levers and tools at their disposal to advance the prosperity and well-being of the populations they serve. Moving forward, these lessons should be used, adopted, and adapted in further studies on linking foresight to standardization. Our study also documented the impact that the use of foresight can have on shaping the international standardization system and, in doing so, influencing the development of future technologies and geopolitical uncertainty. And yet, our study was limited in scope, reserved to one standardization body; additional empirical research on how various standardization bodies and organizations are experimenting with foresight methodologies to inform their operations, and cross-country analysis of the most effective ways to integrate foresight into national standardization governance and operations is needed next.