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CACP Strategic Foresight Program

CACP Strategic Foresight

Fact Sheet

Program Objectives

  1. To offer early/mid-career police members a uniquely challenging and high value professional development option.
  2. To embed Design Thinking skills and expand the members’ understanding of the interplay between factors external to policing, and how they can impact society today and in the future.
  3. To build capacity for Strategic Foresight in Canadian police members to improve their recognition and navigation of seismic shifts in public policy.
  4. To develop evidence-informed trends and plausible future scenarios, each with their own implications, for consideration by the CACP and policing agencies.
  5. To advance the goals of authentic inclusion through the empowerment and development of more diverse middle ranks & civilian populations.

Target Audience

This program applies a collaborative, creative, and design-thinking problem-based learning model that will develop new and enhanced lateral thinking skills, and an ability to see connections and their impacts differently. It will require research, including the learning and application of new qualitative methods, and a fair degree of rigour and scholarship.  In the absence of residential sessions in this fully virtual model, candidates must be able to devote sufficient time to attend periodic virtual engagement learning sessions, along with the self-directed online study and team collaboration involved, anticipated to require about 4 hours minimum per week in total throughout the program’s duration.

The program aims to include a mix of sworn and civilian members of Canadian police services, widely representative of all demographics and police functions, and with at least 10-15 years of career runway remaining ahead of them.  Ideal candidates will be at the ranks of Corporal, Sergeant, Staff Sergeant, or similar sworn or civilian equivalents.  Exceptions on rank may be made on the discretion of nominating agency executives, and on approval by the CACP.

All candidates for the program are subject to CACP approval.  To assist with candidate approvals, nominees are encouraged to include with their Registration Form a 1-2 paragraph bio, outlining relevant work and study experience, along with reasons for their own and their agency’s interest in the CACP Strategic Foresight program.

Additional Information

This program resulted from a proposal made in August 2019 by the 12th cohort of CACP Executive Global Studies, which was approved to a pilot level by the CACP Board in November of that year.  The in-person pilot program ran during 2020, and it was converted to a fully online version in 2021.  A key goal of this program for CACP and for candidate-sponsoring agencies is to build leadership, design thinking and critical analysis skills in police leaders at an earlier phase in their careers, helping them to ‘lift their gaze’ to understand both their current social context in a wider sense, and to look ahead to plausible futures to understand their possible near-term impacts on policy and practice.