How to build a trend radar for strategy
A strategy trend radar helps your organization bring an outside-in view into strategic planning. It organizes relevant external developments into a shared visual overview and supports discussions about what to observe, prepare for, and act on.
This article introduces the main building blocks of a strategy radar and provides practical guidance for designing one in FIBRES.
Before you begin
A strategy radar should be designed around a clear strategic purpose. Before adding content or launching Foresight Agents, consider:
- Who will use the radar?
- What strategic question should it help answer?
- What kinds of external change should it cover?
- What time horizon is relevant?
- How and with who will the radar be used after it is created?
A useful starting question could be: What external developments could shape our strategic choices over the next 3–10 years?
The building blocks of a FIBRES radar
A FIBRES radar combines findings with a configurable visual structure.
| Building block | What it represents |
|---|---|
| Findings | Trends, signals, technologies, megatrends, and other future-relevant developments |
| Sectors | Categories used to organize findings by domain, type, or topic |
| Horizon axis | The timing, urgency, maturity, or recommended action associated with each finding |
| Bubble size | An optional assessment, such as importance or potential impact |
| Bubble color | An optional visual assessment, such as risk, urgency, likelihood, or importance |
| Classifications | Custom metadata used to assess, organize, filter, and compare findings |
Build your trend radar in 7 steps
Step 1: Define the purpose
Start with the strategic decision or conversation the radar should support—not with a long list of trends.
A strategy radar can be used to:
- Support strategy development and reviews
- Bring external change into leadership discussions
- Identify emerging opportunities and threats
- Challenge existing assumptions
- Select topics for deeper analysis
- Inform scenario planning
- Monitor strategically important developments
The purpose will influence the radar’s scope, sectors, horizons, classifications, and content.
Avoid trying to create one radar for every possible use case. A radar designed for corporate strategy will usually require a different structure from a technology, innovation, or risk radar.
Step 2: Define the audience and scope
A radar should not contain everything that is interesting. It should focus on developments that may affect the decisions of its intended users.
For a strategy radar, typical users include:
- Executive teams
- Corporate strategy and foresight teams
- Business unit leaders
- Transformation and innovation teams
- Risk and sustainability leaders
The scope may cover changes in:
- Customers and society
- Technology and data
- Markets and competition
- Policy and regulation
- Sustainability and resources
- Business models and ecosystems
These changes can be captured as:
- Megatrends and their developments
- Trends and emerging trends
- Technology trends
- Weak signals
Try to avoid:
- One-off news without broader significance
- Generic megatrends without strategic implications
- Short-term noise
- Internal operational issues
- Highly technical developments with no clear connection to the radar’s purpose
Step 3: Choose how to build the content
There are two practical ways to start. A top-down approach begins with known developments like megatrends, mature trends and strategic themes. A bottom-up approach begins with early signals of change and observations, then clusters them into emerging trends.
Top-down approach
Begin with known megatrends, strategic themes, or established trend frameworks. Translate them into more specific developments relevant to your organization.
This approach is useful when you:
- Need a broad overview
- Want to ensure sufficient coverage
- Already have a trend framework
- Need a quick starting point for executive discussion
Bottom-up approach
Begin with signals, observations, articles, expert input, and other evidence. Cluster related signals into patterns and formulate broader trends.
This approach is useful when you:
- Want to discover less obvious change
- Are looking for emerging opportunities
- Want trends to be transparently supported by evidence
- Need to challenge established assumptions
On FIBRES platfrom You can create the content collaboratively, import existing trends, use content partners, or use Foresight Agents to create a full radar on your given topic.
Step 4: Define the radar sectors
Radar sectors are the categorization criteria shown on the outer rim of the radar. They are typically used to organize findings by category, domain, or type.
For a broad strategy radar, you could use sectors such as:
| Sector | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Markets & Economy | Demand, investment, pricing, macroeconomic change and value chains |
| Customers & Society | Demographics, behaviors, expectations, lifestyles, values and trust |
| Technology & Data | AI, automation, platforms, data and digital infrastructure |
| Policy & Regulation | Regulation, public policy, standards, compliance and trade rules |
| Sustainability & Resources | Climate, energy, circularity, biodiversity, materials and resource scarcity |
| Competition & Ecosystems | Competitors, new entrants, partnerships, platforms and business models |
These are examples rather than required categories. Choose sectors that reflect the purpose and language of your organization.
Good sectors should be:
- Broad enough to remain useful over time
- Distinct enough to minimize overlap
- Easy for users to understand
- Relevant to the decisions the radar supports
A broad external-environment structure can also reveal blind spots. For example, an empty or underdeveloped sector may indicate that a particular area of change is not being monitored sufficiently.
Read more: How to define radar sectors
Step 5: Define the horizon axis
The horizon axis gives strategic meaning to the position of each finding. Horizons can represent:
- Time to materialization
- Maturity
- Urgency
- Certainty
- Adoption stage
- Recommended action
For an executive strategy radar, an action-oriented horizon is often easy to understand and apply:
| Horizon | Description |
|---|---|
| Observe | Early, emerging, or uncertain developments worth monitoring |
| Plan | Developments becoming important and requiring preparation, capability-building, or further analysis |
| Act | Developments already strategically relevant and requiring attention now |
The same axis should not try to represent several different assessments simultaneously. For example, timing, certainty, and impact are different questions and may need separate classifications.
Keep the number of horizons limited. Three or four levels are usually easier to interpret than a highly detailed axis.
Read more: Timing your trends right: How to set effective horizons
Step 6: Choose bubble size and color
Bubble size and color can add further information to the radar, but they are optional. Use them only when they make the radar easier to interpret.
One possible setup for a strategy radar is:
Bubble size: strategic impact
- Small: Limited potential impact
- Medium: Meaningful potential impact
- Large: Major potential impact
Bubble color: risk and opportunity orientation
- Primarily an opportunity – green
- Primarily a risk – red
- Both a risk and an opportunity – purple
- Unclear or still emerging – grey
Use each visual dimension to communicate only one clear assessment. If users need to interpret too many colors, sizes, sectors, and horizons simultaneously, the radar can become difficult to read.
More detailed information can be stored in classifications and accessed through filters.
Read more: How to define radar bubble colors
Step 7: Define classifications and start using the radar
Classifications add structured metadata to findings. They help users assess, organize, filter, and compare findings from different strategic perspectives.
Possible classifications for a strategy radar include:
Before adding a classification, ask: What will users do differently when they filter or compare findings using this information?
Avoid classifications that overlap heavily or do not support a clear use case. Start with a limited number and expand the setup when a specific need emerges. Classifications can be used to create focused radar views, such as:
- High-relevance findings affecting Europe
- Uncertain developments requiring scenario analysis
- Opportunities affecting products and services
- Trends presenting both risks and opportunities
- Findings relevant to a particular business unit
Read more: How to use classifications
Final tip
A strategy radar should not become a static presentation. Establish a regular rhythm for monitoring, reviewing, and using it.
A good strategy radar is not just a visualization. It is a living system for turning external change into strategic intelligence.
Read more on how to design an effective foresight system: https://www.fibresonline.com/blog/elements-of-effective-foresight-system
