We believe that the best way for an organisation to start the journey towards addressing future humanitarian challenges and threats is through a systematic process of reflection and dialogue, internally and with its partners and other stakeholders. Here you will find our tools to assist our partner organisations and the broader humanitarian community to begin to think about their capacity to deal with the future and to make futures part of their ongoing work.

Our tools are methodologies that an organisation can easily use and adapt, depending on its specific needs. The HFP’s tools can be used with a particular peer group or across an organisation. An organisation can also use these tools with its external partners. Many of the tools are self-assessment based. Our experience demonstrates that self-assessment, reflection and discussion promote learning and engagement and increase the potential for action-taking by a group or organisation

The HFP’s tools are of two types:

1. foundation tools to help an organisation get started in thinking about humanitarian futures in its own context
2. companion tools that help organisations integrate futures thinking and measures into their strategy and operational planning.

Three foundation tools are designed to give  an organisations an initial sense of how   its personnel perceive future threats and  how they perceive the organisation’s capacity for strategic leadership and to be anticipatory, adaptive, collaborative and innovative. These tools include:

• Operationalising Futures Workshop (OFI) 
• Organisational Self-Assessment Tool (OSAT)
• Key Informant Interviews (Kiis)

We also have resources that can help  an organisation work in more depth on any of the five HFP capacities: anticipation, adaptation, collaboration, innovation, and strategic leadership.  We recently added strategic leadership as one of our core capacities in recognition of its importance to an organization’s ability to work effectively in the face of uncertainty and complexity.

The HFP is also developing a set of companion tools designed to help an organisation assess what types of information systems, innovations, strategic formulation processes and collaborative networks it has for anticipating and adapting to ‘what might be’ and for strengthening its capacities.

These companion tools include:

• Gaining the Future
• Partner and Network Analysis Tool (PAN)
• Stories, Scenarios & Simulation Workbook
• Guidelines for Strategic Leadership
• Futures Group  Methodologies