When was the last time you thought about the future? Likelihood is, only a few moments ago, before you thought of the past which had to occur for you to answer the last question truthfully. We think about the future all of the time, to the angst of many a Zen Buddhist monks, who advocate living in the present moment (which of course also has its merits).
But do we think about the future in a structured way that enables successful and agile strategies to emerge? The answer is No for most of us. The reason for that negative response is that change management courses often don't teach people how to have ownership of change, through authorship of those change strategies.
Here, what I will show you is the scenario planning tool that Thinque uses in our consulting and futurist facilitation with organisation's around the globe. (For those that are interested in using this for their own personal use, this process also works for individual organisational leaders or anyone wanting to career plan for the future).
If you're interested in learning more about scenario planning and creating a 2020 vision, feel free to let us know.
The starting point in any scenario planning exercise to create your futurist strategy is to ensure that your leadership team is clear on what question it is answering as part of the process. Have a crack at filling in the blanks here.
For example: what is the future go-to market strategy of SAP in the next 8 years?
This piece is critical as it will frame the entire context of the scenario planning exercise to come.
Once you have framed your question, its context, and a time frame, it's time to look at the disrupive trends affecting your industry. We call these certainties and uncertainties.
For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, certainties and uncertainties include:
- eHealth records
- Big Data
- The future of blockbuster drug focus
- Data Privacy and Fully Integrated Pharmaceutical Networks (outsourcing and partnering essentially)
- Integrated Health Systems
- Mobile Sales Forces
- Government and FDA regulations
- Generic Inroads
- BioTech and Venture Capitalist funding
- Genomics and Tailored Therapeutics
- Design Thinking and Customer-Centricity
- Ask yourself, what certainties and uncertainties are facing your industry over the coming years?
Could it be:
- Digital Disruption
- The rise of the BRIC Nations
- New Entrants
- Government Regulation
- Global Warming
- Green Washing
- Demographic Shifts
- Mobile Payments
- etc?
Once you're clear on the question you are answering and the top certainties/top uncertainties, pick the top uncertainties that are most highly relevant and most impactful for your company/industry.
For example, in the printing and digital solutions industry this could be:
- strength of the economy
- digital disruption
- offset v digital printing
- big data and its importance
- mobile technology
- technological adaptation rate
- speed of device innovation
- retail revivalism
In Thinque's scenario planning and future strategy consulting we use the STEEP model (also known as PEST or PESTLe depending on the industry). It's a great way of ensuring that you map both socio-cultural, technological, economic, environmental and political disruptions that are likely to impact your 2020 Vision.
To ensure that you're focussing on the key uncertainties and that you can create a future strategy that is both powerful and agile, you need to prioritise and pick the 2 that will create cognitive tensions and creative inputs. So, for our current purposes, let us pick:
- Technological Adaptation Rate
- Strength of the Economy
Once you have picked your dimensions, map them into the extremes of this grid. For our printing and digital solutions examples, let us go with the idea of technological adaptation rate with slow on the left, and fast on the right, and the economy's strength as good at the top and bad at the bottom.
- Can you see how this creates 4 unique future worlds or alternative scenarios?
For example: a strong economy with slow technological adaptation rate by consumers/clients will be radically different from a weak economy, where the technological adaptation rate is fast. At this stage, ensure your leadership teams think deeply and separately about each of these 4 worlds, and how they might impact you. A fun and impactful way of doing this is to divide your team into heterogeneous teams of diverse thinkers, and ask them to think of your 2020 Vision, within the confines of one of the 4 quadrants. Ask each team of 4 to do this.
The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to:
- find a title for your future quadrant eg. Techno Ghetto (weak economy and fast technological adaptation rate)
- provide a newsflash from 2020 (or whichever time period you have set): "Singularity impacts cheap androids who only read from Google glasses"
- map the implications and actions required to cope with each of the worlds eg. moving from print to mobile devices, investing in new technology, outsourcing big data entry etc.
