Foresight Trends
The intersection of housing and (health)care for older adults in 10 - 15 years
Why scan for trends that might impact the future of housing+health+aging?
The practice of scanning for trends and drivers of change requires we look at as many sources of information as possible to understand the diversity of headlines, outliers, new approaches and ideas that might impact the future. It can be a highly collaborative process drawing on the expertise of many different individuals and organizations.
In our case, we reviewed secondary research, drew on the expertise of the Building with Mission steering committee and incorporated input from over 30 surveys completed by individuals we reached through our website and social media.
First, we spent time reviewing the trends and drivers of change that sit at the intersection of housing + care + aging. After this, we prioritized the emergent forces of change to identify those that were most critical to addressing unmet needs in affordable housing and care for seniors and also the most uncertain. Finally, we explored what the future could look like if the most critical and most uncertain drivers of change played out in one direction or another over the next 10+ years. The result of this process yielded a set of four alternative scenarios for the future of housing and care for older adults in Canada.
How to use these trends
The practice of scanning means regularly reviewing headlines and critically thinking about each as a signal of change. What does this headline tell us about the future of our sector?
We often group headlines into trends to make this process easier. The trends below are not consumer trends, they are foresight trends. Some will come true and some will not. Our job isn’t to predict the future, it’s to ask questions that lead to interesting conversations.
One simple way to use these trends is to get a group of your colleagues to review them and collectively discuss your responses to two key questions:
How might these trends impact our sector?
Why are these happening?
For the second question, try to explain the forces behind them. The forces used in the Building With Mission foresight process included government spending, a focus on equity, health and housing policy and the value society places on older adults. Each of these is critical to the future of the sector and we felt uncertain about how they would play out over the next 10–15 years. We used these drivers of change to develop our scenarios of the future.
If you want to go one step further, start asking for headlines at weekly meetings, grouping them into trends by theme and asking your colleagues to respond to those two key questions every few months with a new set of trends. This is a great way to focus not just on what is happening today but on what you might expect to happen in the future.
Here is a summary of the trends that we identified that helped to shape our future scenarios. As an organization, you may identify and prioritize other trends or drivers.
