Strategic Foresight in Practice: The Case of the U.S. Coast Guard

The U.S. Coast Guard¹ is a maritime military, regulatory, intelligence, and law-enforcement organization that traces its origins to a 1787 proclamation by Alexander Hamilton.² It has approximately 50,000 full-time employees (42,000 active-duty military and 8,000 civilians), and its budget is roughly $12 billion, making it tiny by comparison with, say, the U.S. Navy. It is led by a four-star admiral who serves as commandant, but unlike the other military services, the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security.³

The Coast Guard presents an interesting case study of strategic foresight for three reasons.

First, the organization traditionally focused on the short term because it is highly operational. The Coast Guard has 11 statutorily mandated missions, ranging from fisheries protection to port security, and it is often called upon in emergencies, such as Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, forcing it to maintain a state of constant readiness.⁴

Second, foresight practitioners in the U.S. government often refer to the Coast Guard’s Project Evergreen—a cyclical scenario planning exercise—as the “gold standard” among federal agencies, not only because it has been in continuous operation longer than any other comparable effort,⁵ but also because it has demonstrated success in linking future thought to present action. Other organizations, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have sought to emulate its work.⁶

Third, although a predecessor exercise, Project Long View, was held in 1998 and 1999, Project Evergreen began operating in 2003, at a time when the Coast Guard was under extreme organizational stress. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 had shifted it from the Department of Transportation to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security, its budget grew dramatically, and the balance and scope of its mission set changed radically. The Coast Guard thus represents an extreme case of an organization addressing future uncertainty while still operating in the present.

The following case study is based upon interviews with more than 20 people associated with Projects Long View and Evergreen, most of them current and former high-ranking Coast Guard officers, as well as upon documents produced by each iteration of the scenario planning exercise. Where useful, this data was supplemented with congressional testimony, U.S. government reports, practitioner articles, and press accounts.

Three principal findings emerge from this research:

1. By providing a structured mechanism for addressing the uncertainty of the future, Projects Long View and Evergreen addressed the question of how to think about the future.
2. By providing a framework for how to think about the future, Projects Long View and Evergreen helped the Coast Guard increase how much the organization attended to the future.
3. In establishing a structure to think about the future and increasing how much the organization attended to the future, Projects Long View and Evergreen enabled action in the present, including improved organizational adaptability.

When Admiral James Loy became commandant in 1998, he wanted to transform the Coast Guard’s culture from one of short-term reactivity to one that incorporated long-term strategy while retaining a high level of operational responsiveness. The challenge, as posed earlier, is that short-term thinking is, in many ways, a mechanism for coping with the uncertainty of the long term, so to change what members of the organization thought about (i.e., the future vs. the present), they had to be shown how to manage the uncertainty of the long term. As a retired commander who worked on Evergreen explained:

[The short term] is our comfortable anchor spot that we will go back to. So, even if we eliminate those drivers, we are still, as people, hardwired to look at just the next week, next hour … and so we have to overcome that and create a mechanism where they can actually think long-term.⁷

That was where strategic foresight came in—specifically in the form of a scenario planning exercise dubbed Project Long View.⁸ Scenario planning is a disciplined method of imagining alternative futures so as to better sense, shape, and adapt to the emerging future. Or, as Loy put it, “Can you articulate half a dozen scenarios that are part of both your daily toil and your long-term future so you can define the capabilities and resources you will need to do what’s expected of you when the defecation is in the blades?”⁹

To facilitate the exercise, the Coast Guard hired The Futures Group, a strategic foresight consultancy, which worked with Loy’s Office of Strategic Analysis to draft scenarios set 20 years in the future—scenarios that were not meant to predict the future but rather to encompass the range of plausible futures.¹⁰ To do this, the consultants led a team of Coast Guard personnel, who first considered forces of change that could have a significant but uncertain impact on the service’s future operating environment. Ultimately, they settled on four: the role of the federal government (limited or substantial), U.S. economic vitality (strong or weak), threats to U.S. society (low or high), and the demand for maritime services (low or high). Juxtaposing the values for these variables yielded 16 different combinations, of which five were selected as representing a diverse set of potential futures. These combinations were then translated into brief narratives—each given a name—expounding on what each world would look like and how it might come about. So, for example, “Balkanized America” described a world riven by regional and ethnic conflict, in which terrorists struck the United States frequently, and “Taking on Water” described a future in which the American economy struggled amid significant environmental degradation.¹¹

These scenarios then served as the basis for a series of workshops, where Coast Guard participants identified 10 “robust” strategies—i.e., strategies that could be pursued immediately and that would serve the organization well no matter how the future unfolded. The Coast Guard incorporated those recommendations into its 1999 Strategic Plan,¹² but at first, it did not pursue most of them. That changed after the September 11 attacks, when the Coast Guard leadership ordered a “Long View review.” That effort found that, had the service implemented Long View’s 10 strategic initiatives more rapidly, it would have been better positioned to respond to the attacks and the expanded mission set that followed.¹³ With that realization, the Coast Guard institutionalized a scenario planning process, now dubbed “Project Evergreen,” that runs on a quadrennial cycle of sensing, envisioning, workshopping, and strategizing. The first iteration, Evergreen I, started in 2003, and Evergreen V is currently underway.

By generating plausible far-future scenarios and enabling strategic conversations about their implications, Long View and Evergreen showed Coast Guard personnel “how” to think about the future. As a former vice admiral said: “The whole idea behind Evergreen was to have some sort of structured way to address these difficult-to-get-your-hands-around uncertainties in the future.”¹⁴ The scenario planning exercises offered a “framework,”¹⁵ a “tool,”¹⁶ and a “process”¹⁷ for grappling with the long-term future.

By providing a mechanism for how to think about the future, Long View and Evergreen reoriented the service away from its tight focus on short-term operations, opening the Coast Guard’s temporal aperture so that it could also attend to long-term strategy. In other words, it helped resolve the problem of how much to think about the future. This change manifested in individuals, programs, and the organization as a whole.

Over the program’s 23-year history, over 1,000 members of the organization are estimated to have participated in formulating strategy under uncertainty via Long View and Evergreen. Their experiences then affected the organization in several ways. First, those individuals emerged from the exercises with a new outlook—a new set of cognitive tools—that allowed them to engage the uncertainty of the future more easily. A command master chief petty officer said that the process “provided me many more opportunities to continue to look forward” and then recounted a recent conversation with a colleague:

He and I were in my office here this morning talking about, 25 years from now, what is the Coast Guard Reserve component going to look like? He’s an Evergreen guy. … I would never have been able to talk to him about 20, 25 years down the road because I just wouldn’t understand how to think that way had it not been for being part of a couple Evergreens.¹⁸

Individuals who had been through Long View and Evergreen also transmitted their new facility with the future to their colleagues. One retired captain, a former helicopter pilot and self-described “pointy-end-of-the-spear operator” who initially doubted the value of Evergreen, impressed the exercise’s lessons on his subordinates so that future-thinking would become part of the organization:

My opportunity when I got back to the field was to make sure that my wardroom—my officers and the commanding officers that worked for me—were starting to think that way. I made them all read Evergreen. … I was trying to make that next generation of guys who worked for me think strategically, and I think it was perhaps successful because my senior officers all went on to commands. … I think that strategic thinking has [now] become part of the Coast Guard ethos at the leadership level.¹⁹

Evergreen also influenced how much the organization attended to the future. Its efforts informed a range of policy documents from the 1999 Strategic Plan to the service’s Arctic strategy (2013), Western hemisphere strategy (2014), and cyber strategy (2015). Most recently, the 2018 Strategic Plan, issued shortly after Admiral Karl Schultz became commandant, explicitly highlighted Evergreen as a “long-term strategic planning effort” connected to management of the service.²⁰ As one former officer who headed the Office of Strategic Analysis and initially expressed skepticism about scenario planning, said, “For me, the work of Evergreen—and Long View before that—directly played into our ability to ultimately get to the point when the Coast Guard issued enterprise-level strategies.”²¹

In sum, by giving Coast Guard personnel a tool for how to engage the uncertainty of the long-term future, Long View and Evergreen increased how much they did so, despite persistent operational demands. This break with short-termism constituted an “inflection point” for the organization as one former Coast Guard executive put it.²² Of course, per the earlier discussion of the tension between planning and operations, it is fair to ask whether changing how and how much the Coast Guard attended to the future actually affected policy. Here, the record is mixed. Many strategies derived from Evergreen were never translated into policy. That said, Evergreen has clearly influenced operations in the present.

Thinking about the future is not a goal in and of itself. One key purpose of strategic foresight efforts is to enable better policy in the present, as Long View and Evergreen intended.²³ But, as discussed earlier, organizations often see the two activities—future thought and present action—as being in tension even though they must do both. Admiral Thad Allen, who served as commandant from 2006 to 2010, put the matter bluntly:

The question is, can you walk and chew gum at the same time? Can you multitask to deal with the tyranny of the present, and then try and understand the implications of the future and the risk associated with the future and how you minimize the risk of what might happen in the future while you’re managing the tyranny of the present. You have to do both, and if you don’t do both, you’re going to fail.²⁴

Interestingly, in the Coast Guard, instead of there being a trade-off between present and future, the two became complementary. As Evergreen managers and workshop participants returned to the field, resuming their operational responsibilities, they not only considered the future more, but they also layered their newfound future-oriented strategic sensibility onto the challenges they faced in their day-to-day work. One retired vice admiral said: “Smart people that came back from the Evergreen experience and then were embedded back in programs would say, ‘Hey, I think there’s some real good that came out of that that we can take advantage of.’”²⁵

One retired senior Coast Guard leader explained: “I would have to credit some of what was done with the Evergreen process to the forward thinking I was able to do in getting the Coast Guard ready for whatever threats we’d have to confront out in the Pacific region,”²⁶ citing Evergreen I’s recommendation to cultivate partnerships and increase situational awareness at sea²⁷:

We forged bilateral relationships with six key Pacific Island countries to expand information sharing, conduct professional exchanges to enhance their nascent capabilities, hold regular joint exercises and operational patrols…

To enhance MDA [maritime domain awareness], we routinely shared information with the countries aligned through the North Pacific CG Forum (coast guards of China, Russia, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and U.S.). As this alliance grew more robust, we coordinated patrol activities, held joint training exercises, shared sighting information (especially to track fishing activity), and tackled issues with formally designated working groups.²⁸

This officer concluded: “Evergreen facilitated my ability to prioritize effort through strategic intent as adapted to the uniqueness of the western Pacific. … I would not have dedicated such energy to outreach and relationship-building without the benefit of the Evergreen initiative.”²⁹

Some Evergreen participants applied scenario planning to specific problems. One rear admiral who first participated in Evergreen as a junior officer ran a scenario exercise to address how future challenges in the Great Lakes region should influence procurement. Evergreen, she said, helped her do more than simply extrapolate from the present:

As you have to replace assets, if you haven’t really done some of that deeper long-term thinking, then what happens is your replacements look pretty much like what you had. … If you have a bigger picture and you’re not constrained by any of that currently, it just makes it so much easier to come up with the right answers.³⁰

In the most extreme situations, acting in the present demands responding to radical shifts in the environment. One goal of Long View and Evergreen was to improve the Coast Guard’s ability to adapt to “change and surprise”³¹—“to immunize the organization against a black swan,” as Allen put it.³²

Immunization is a high bar, but following the September 11 attacks, the Coast Guard found itself with new resources, a new organizational master, and a newly rebalanced mission set. (Previously, port security accounted for 1–2 percent of the service’s daily operations. In the years after 9/11, it consumed some 50–60 percent.)³³ Project Long View had not anticipated the attacks, but it had considered a world in which “terrorism strikes frequently and increasingly close to home.”³⁴ Although the Coast Guard did not immediately adopt Long View’s strategies, the exercise pressure-tested and socialized certain ideas among Coast Guard leaders, enabling the organization to better adapt to the post-9/11 environment. As the Coast Guard’s former chief financial officer said:

When we had 9/11, we had a binder full of plans and ideas that, from 2003 to 2010, everyone said, “You’re right—that’s exactly what we need,” and they started funding it. We watched our budget grow from about $3 billion to almost $11 billion in less than a decade. It was all after 9/11, and it was, I would say, largely because some of that thinking and thought that had been done in the Evergreen model before 9/11 that allowed us to roll that out.³⁵

One of those ideas was Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), defined as “the ability to acquire, track, and identify in real time any vessel or aircraft entering America’s maritime domain.”³⁶ Long View did not create the concept, but it clarified that there was no future in which the Coast Guard would not want a better understanding of who and what was at sea. Long View took an oft-discussed concept and codified it as organizational strategy. As a result, amid post-9/11 concerns that the next terrorist attack could come by water and the resulting imperative to secure U.S. ports, the Coast Guard did not have to waste time vetting or socializing the idea.

Instead, it was able to take the organizational lead at the national level. In January 2002, mere months after the attacks, the White House singled out the Coast Guard’s central role in MDA.³⁷ In December 2004, President George W. Bush established MDA as U.S. policy,³⁸ and the Coast Guard captain who had managed Evergreen I led the interagency process to develop the first National Strategy for Maritime Security and the corresponding National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness.³⁹ Ultimately, these led to deployment of the Nationwide Automatic Identification System for tracking vessels, and today MDA is central to U.S. homeland security.

Despite such examples, many interviewees noted that Long View and Evergreen struggled to translate the concepts and strategies that emerged from the exercises into actionable policy. One Coast Guard official lamented that, too often, the Evergreen reports were seen as “shelfware.” As a recent RAND report put it: “Project Evergreen has not had as great an impact on the Coast Guard as might be desired. A key reason for this appears to be a long-standing disconnect between Evergreen and the processes that it aims to influence.”⁴⁰ It recommended adjusting timing so that Evergreen produced recommendations in time to influence relevant decisions.

The managers of Evergreen V, the most recent iteration, have addressed that critique by instituting “Pinecones”—rapid scenario exercises sponsored by an individual Coast Guard leader to address a specific strategic question. The goal, as one officer explained, has been to generate recommendations that address problems the service’s leadership is facing now—in other words, to more closely link future thought with present action. For example, a Pinecone held in the fall of 2020 examined the future of the Coast Guard’s workforce, finding that, instead of putting service members on a specific track for their careers, the Coast Guard should emphasize both technical know-how and continuous learning to improve employee adaptability. “This is not shocking,” the officer said, “but it is different for the Coast Guard.”⁴¹

The workshop’s findings caught the eye of Admiral Shultz, who then asked if it was possible to implement some of the recommendations in 2021. As of this writing, the Coast Guard is formulating a strategy to transform its antiquated human resources system into a modern talent management system. Said the official, “I think this is the first [Evergreen] cycle, from what I can tell, where you have a fairly quick return on investment.”⁴²