introducing the futures school!
TRANSCRIPT
Learn Foresight!An Introduction to The Futures School
Our immersive approach to creating the future has been embraced around the world!
February 26, 2015
Today’s business leaders must remain focused on what’s next. In order to gain greater visibility about the future, what is needed is not a
better crystal ball, but rather an instrument for building resilience, adaptability and opportunity through recognition of emerging patterns.
Futures Thinking is that instrument.
Strategic Foresight provides the framework.
Future planning in our current volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment requires us to leverage both
quantitative and qualitative approaches.
Strategic Foresight recognizes that the future cannot be predicted but it can be mapped.
It is no longer enough to extrapolate historical data forward to create an official, linear future.
Effective long-‐term planning must consider multiple future operating environments in order to ensure strategy is resilient, adaptive and transformative.
Strategic Foresight is a discipline but is actually best served as an integrated philosophy.
Organizations that intentionally develop a futures culture are primed for market-‐leading innovation, successful opportunity development, and revenue-‐generating futures intelligence.
Most organizations focus solely on the Push of the Future which represents the trends and emerging issues that are pushing us into the future regardless of what we do. Conversely, the Pull of the Future represents our ability to identify and create our preferred futures.
Strategic Foresight allows us to leverage both ends of the futures spectrum: the “Push” and the “Pull.”
Push of the
Future
Pull of the Future
Challenge Assumptions
Scan to Uncover Hidden Opportunities
ExploreDiscover
Design and Execute Action Plans
Create
Develop Future Scenarios
Map
Natural Foresight is an action-‐based approach to
building a futures thinking competency. Organized in
an adaptive, resilient and transformative approach that has been successfully implemented in large,
multinational firms, Natural
Foresight includes foresight tools such as environmental scanning, assumption and bias
modeling and scenario development.
Challenge Assumptions
DiscoverToday’s environment of accelerating volatility
and exponential change is disrupting paradigms in every domain. However, our deeply engrained biases and assumptions
prevent us from recognizing these disruptions and taking action to capitalize on
them.
Strategic Foresight helps us to look past our present-‐day models and ideas, acting as the most effective way to recognize disruptors on
the horizon of business and society.
External scanning and trend analysis in the macro (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political) environment
is a necessity – future disruptors, competitors and opportunities will most
likely originate from outside your industry.
Strategic Foresight works from the outside-‐in, providing the tools to slay the data
tsunami and identify the weak signals on the horizon.
Scan to Uncover Hidden
Opportunities
Explore
Develop Future Scenarios
Map Scenarios are an incredibly powerful tool due to their ability to immerse
organizations into future probabilities, possibilities, and aspirational outcomes.
These well-‐informed maps allow firms to assess the validity, robustness and future-‐readiness of their current strategies, while also uncovering new ideas, products, and models that they would have otherwise
missed.
Design and Execute Action
Plans
Create It’s not enough to build strategy, innovate, map out organizational
development or “look into the future” without successfully acting upon all of
that hard work.
Organizations must build both short and long-‐range action plans and
deliverables to help implement innovation and preferred future
outcomes.
Context and Background Futures Intelligence
World Building Strategy Recommendations
• Unconscious Bias Modeling
• Ladder of Inference• Causal Layered
Analysis
Explore personal and organizational assumptions around the focal issue.
Sample Tools:
Discover and interpret the emerging trends, patterns and clusters.
• Environmental Scanning• Qualitative Predictive Analysis• Probability/ Impact Matrix• Pattern and Sensemaking
Sample Tools:
Create sets of divergent, provocative maps using creativity, data, intuition, and research.
• Scenario Fields• Cross Impact Matrix• Narrative Transformation• Futures Wheels• Design Fiction
Sample Tools:
Inform long-range planning efforts, inspire innovation and begin creating the future today!
• Backcasting• Artifacting the Future• Sign Posts• Scenario Commonalities• Scenario/Strategy Matrix
Sample Tools:
We help our clients: • Uncover emerging trends and issues that will
impact their business. • Discover unseen opportunities for strategic
development and advantage. • Thrive in a world of complex ideas and
practices.
Kedge is a minority-owned, global foresight, innovation and
strategic design firm.
TFS is a one-of-a-kind, interactive and project-based training program.
Program participants will: • Identify emerging trends and weak signals on
the horizon. • Build "maps of the future" that generate
successful strategies, actions and organizational narratives.
• Harness the future to make better decisions today.
www.KedgeFutures.com
www.TheFuturesSchool.com
Next Session: May 5-7, 2015