On Building the First Part of Your Strategy

Starting guns and starting cannons.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to talk about how to build the first column in your Strategy Chart.

Three weeks ago I started teaching you how to build a Strategy Chart or Strategy Wall to help you prepare for what’s next. Here’s the quick how:

Get the biggest sheet of paper you can find or open a spreadsheet on your computer or — if you work someplace that has a Wall of Whiteboards — get your favorite marker that colors dark enough that you can read it from the moon.

Make five giant columns, left to right:

(1) List of Emerging Trends, Events, Developments, Policies, and Perils

(2) Ramifications and Possible Outcomes (futures) for each

(3) Thus Emerging Needs and/or Opportunities for each

(4) Responses Needed for each

(5) How To Respond (specific plans). (Hint: start with verbs.)

Once you have those columns, work each trend/event/development/policy/peril across — each in its own row.

In order to create good, valid forecasts — rather than jump straight to unfair, invalid utopias, hyperbole, or hysteria — Column (1) has to begin with the actual beginnings of things rather than starting with a secondary or tertiary effect of that initial thing. Hate crimes are a secondary/downstream effect of teaching hate, for example.

• Now, sure, the real beginning for much of the political, legal, economic, and other changes is the reelection of Donald Trump but where we’ll start is with Trump’s priorities and policies. Those belong in Column (1).

• Later, we will include other emerging trends, developments and events we can reasonably expect to occur during the next 2-4 years. Things other than Trump Administration-sparked stuff — like futures for housing and the housing shortage and the continued displacement of older generations by younger, larger, browner ones. (I could also expand this list later with the Supreme Court’s docket for next year.) But it’s more important to look at ramifications of particular Trump policies first because his policies will quickly shape how those other-than-Trump emerging trends, etc. things could shake out. Put another way, what Trump does will help or hurt — or free or constrain — what’s possible for those other actors and factors. (In case you, you know, needed any reminder that paying attention to politics matters. Because politics makes policies that will help you or punch you in your broken nose.)

Of course there’s no way to figure out all of the batshit crazy that’s gonna batshit-its-crazy-all-over-the-place, so consider this an initial list for Column (1) that I’ll flesh out along the way.

• My list is set in the macro/national level rather than the micro/state/local level (if only for teaching purposes here) and I’ve organized by buckets/bins/categories. See, to get as much of a comprehensive, 360-degree look at the future, it’s more important to get the buckets right first and then expand the lists within each bucket.

So here’s my initial list for Column (1) of the Trump stuff based on what he’s said will be his priorities and policies. Again, I’ll flesh this out over time as we learn what his actual policies will be because he was concepts-of-a-plan vague through most of the campaign and it’s not clear to what degree he’ll actually use Project 2025 as a precise playbook.

In the economic recovery bucket:

• Tariffs

• Renewal of Trump tax cuts that are due to expire next year

In the overlap of the economic recovery bucket and security bucket:

• Mass deportations

In the War on the Deep State, War on the Nanny State, and Personal Revenge Tour bucket:

• Reinstating his executive order reclassifying some career federal civil servants who hold civil service protections as political appointees who don’t (converting them to Schedule F employees)

• Sabotage, reduction, and/or defunding particular US Government Departments and Agencies like the Department of Education, Department of Veterans Affairs, etc. (I’ll make a more specific list later after I go back through Project 2025.)

• Cabinet confirmations (only particular ones if/as they are confirmed)

• Revenge-driven/intimidation-effort federal investigations and/or arrests of police/investigators/prosecutors/regulators, of the press, of dissenters/protesters, of Democrats (and of who else?)

In the conservative culture war bucket:

• I don’t know how to construct this list quite yet. Project 2025 contains the most cogent and comprehensive laundry list of conservative culture war policies right now and I need to reread it with a different forecasting eye now. I’ll have to come back to this. (I am actually less worried about conservatives gaining ground on many culture war issues — they’ve been losing and are on deck to continue losing for a long time. The election threw a hairpin turn into our overall political trajectory but it impacted our cultural trajectory on culture war issues not at all. For example, even most conservative women in America still largely believe women should have as many rights as women and if you argue to them that they shouldn’t they will hand you your ass in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Martha. The moral arc of the American universe continues to bend toward justice. I talked about this some earlier this year and I’ll talk about this again soon.)

A few caveats and explanations about the list:

• I’m not going to do a national security bucket or foreign policy bucket for, well, a range of reasons. But the main reason I’m not going to for now is that — barring a major war that I can’t and won’t forecast — those buckets won’t impact Americans’ kitchen tables nearly as much as the things on this list.

• The main reason this list is so frickin’ short is that they’re the main starting guns that could/will set off a great deal of what’s next. And they’re less starting guns than starting cannons. (Also, some of his priorities and policies are subsets or follow-ons within the items on this list so I’m starting with the overall priority or endeavor and will deal with those subset features along the way during the forecasting process.)

• And the main reason why these are painted with such a broad brush is to allow us to use different futurist techniques and methods to create forecasts and scenarios for each Column (1) item in Column (2) — the Ramifications column. For example, to forecast the ramifications of tariffs we could construct a futures wheel and/or do a black sky exercise. Same for mass deportations and for Schedule F. But for attacks on, say, the Department of Veterans Affairs we may create a set of scenarios instead.

This is my initial list. What’s yours?

Special Note: I use the term forecast too loosely for comfort for many professional futurists because forecast — when used as a noun — connotes that someone is making ONE SINGULAR sorta-prediction for the future of something, ie. “My forecast is that the economy will reach blah-blah-blah specific point by the second quarter of 2025.” That’s not what I do and that’s not what I’m teaching you to do. I’m using forecast more as a verb to connote more like engaging in the act of doing foresight or structured thinking about the future. The foresight (futurist) community uses the verb foresighting (or similar) more often but I’m sticking with forecasting for now because it’s closer to common usage and because you’re new to the practice and because you’re normal.

And I’m trying to make you weird.