In 2023, the Palais gave its innovation cell, Cellule Nova+, a mandate: run a strategic foresight program. The team had varied expertise and plenty of curiosity. What it didn't have was a shared idea of what foresight is, or of what this program should watch. Éric Letarte led the project for &friends, and we designed and facilitated the workshops together. We chose not to teach foresight in a classroom and frame the program in a separate meeting. We did both at once. Each workshop opened with a short lesson, then put it to work on the Palais's own reality. Every activity left one piece of the frame on the wall.
Each workshop paired a concept with a decision. The team never learned something it didn't apply to the Palais within the hour.
What strategic foresight is, and what it isn't: not a crystal ball, not futurology, not a statistical forecast. The futures cone, from possible to preferable. The six reasons to do foresight, from the School of International Futures.
The first choices of the program, and 20 questions for the future.
Why foresight needs a map of the system, and why the map is never the territory.
An internal and an external map of the Palais, merged into one ecosystem.
The five traits of a weak signal: novelty, surprise, challenge, significance and delay. Gathering versus exploring. How signals add up to a clue, a driver, then a trend.
A first harvest of weak signals, a list of sources to follow, and a look at the signals of the past.
A driver of change is a cause. A trend is the result you can observe. A reference future is what happens if nothing surprising happens.
A prioritized PESTEL and a first reference future of the Palais.
We asked the team what it wanted to know about the future, in the form of a question. Some were vast, some very concrete. A few looked for the downside of new things, which is healthy: an innovation team tends to see every novelty as good news. Remember the metaverse. Translated from French.
The learning didn't stop when the workshop did. After each session, the team got a collective memory: everything it had produced, digitized, followed by our findings for what comes next and the actions to consider. Each activity became a recommendation for running the program.
The Palais des congrès de Montréal hosts close to 300 events and more than 775,000 visitors a year. In June 2026, the Québec government moved ahead with a project to modernize and densify the building, adding more than 13,000 m² of convention space and a hotel. Figures from quebec.ca.
