The Futureproofing Stack
Eleven Facets to Envisioning & Delivering “The Future Beyond Innovation”
Author: Sean Moffitt, Founder & Managing Director. Futureproofing
Technology has a stack. Finance has a stack. Sales has a stack. Marketing has a stack. We think the elements of change, innovation and transformation need a stack too. We’re calling it the Futureproofing Stack and we are designing 11 parts of our operation around them.
Eleven Facets of Our Futureproofing Stack
I’ll be summarizing different facets of our Futureproofing movement over the next few months, some distinctive beliefs and tools, as well as what we are offering. When it comes to this work, we are all in.
In this article, I’m serving up a little bit of what our Futureproofing Stack is all about -the combination of eleven initiatives and services we are moving forward with, to serve our clients, enlighten the world, educate our audiences and run successful projects.
Both in our orientation and titling of our stack below, we are approaching the future beyond innovation as not only a thinking and advisory set of pieces but also a doing mindset and changing enablement. You don’t need a VC, you need a distillery. You don’t need a business model canvas, you need a hatchery. Innovation+ is doing (otherwise it’s just art & play). It’s frequently what’s missing in this work. Frequently the people thinking up the work are bereft of talent in doing the work. Consultancies say they want change, but they are slow. Boutiques say they want change the world, but really they’d rather just be i the front of it. Agencies say they want to disrupt the planet, but operate in their media & ad lanes.
Screw the filter here — let’s stop playing nice — clients, practitioners, learners — you don’t need more ideas, speeches, explanations, authorities & coaches, you need more possibilities, canvases, catalysts, conveyor belts & pathways to success and the future. Let’s stop wasting time How do we actually get these great innovative ideas over the finish line and into a culture that readily accepts them? Tap into our best ways.
I. The Futureproofing “Gallery” — A Performance for All Seasons
The Problem Faced: Innovators and change agents around the world need the freshest perspectives and most recent discoveries to catch up and stay up.
The “Gallery” Solution: Futureproofing has created a wide-ranging gallery of 55 different keynotes, briefings and workshops across 10 core change areas:
The Special FP Sauce: Each keynote has been updated over the last couple years, to address the seven most requested topics by audiences; they can be adapted to six types of formats and average 4.3 out of 5 performance scoring.
II. The Futureproofing “Hangar” — Real Progress on Your Biggest Challenges
The Problem Faced: Innovators and change agents around the world need a little a little less talk and lot more headway on their biggest challenges & opportunities.
The “Hangar” Solution: Futureproofing has created a seven step model that actual gets change projects out of the sandbox, teases out tensions and creates we’re in this together traction and scale, with fast work over short distances.
The Special FP Sauce: Each Hangar sprint is supported by a history of success bringing about change, seven steps that most alternative models don’t consider and enlightened ways to experiment and collaborate with others.
III. The Futureproofing “Hatchery” — Configuring Better Value
The Problem Faced: Innovators and change agents don’t need more ideas, products or even services, they need ways to configure better value that delivers against a complex web of stakeholders’ and demanding customers’ needs.
The “Hatchery” Solution: Unlike nearly every advisory firm in the world, Futureproofing has deeply specialized in the identification and development of the most promising business models & ecosystems —two areas that have experienced a 10X rise in industry interest over the last decade.
The Special FP Sauce: The Hatchery has inventoried 200 business model archetypes, top 50 value propositions and 25 ecosystem roles, and ranked all of them for the future, supported by leading edge research on Business Models of the Future© and Together Better Ecosystems©, with not only special expertise in identifying them but also how the best pivot and expand their models & networks.
IV. The Futureproofing “Academy” — Become Futureproofers for Life
The Problem Faced: Innovators, change agents and leaders, have a difficult time of it — ordered to change at the speed of the world, keep internal and external people happy, apply their talents on a daily basis, who has the time or energy to keep up to speed and reinvest with what’s changing and successful in the craft of change.
The “Academy” Solution: The Futureproofing Academy is a way for practitioners to reinvest their craft easily, creating both masterclass and corporate curriculums to ensure we not only feed you the best art and science of innovation+ but also teach you to fish for yourselves, at you own speed.
The Special FP Sauce: The Futureproofing Academy pushes the boundaries for what you have learned previously, considers all seven facets of front, middle and back end innovation and provides elements of twelve difference learning experiences. Available as standalone courses, or packaged as a corporate curriculum.
V. The “Futureproofing” Refinery — Determining & Benchmarking Your Future-Readiness
The Problem Faced: Innovators, change agents and leaders frequently ask themselves, where does our company/our teams/our people stand in the world of change? are we tall, short or in the middle? and who will credibly benchmark and break it down for us? It’s near impossible to do starting in the mirror.
The “Refinery” Solution: Futureproofing has functionally-neutral audits for future-readiness that we believe provide enormous value as an initial benchmark and ongoing monitor of your set up for future success, with access to Lite, Basic or Extensive audits.
The Special FP Sauce: The Futureproofing Refinery independently and credibly evaluates across 18 of the most essential and structural factors that set your comopany, teams and yourself for the elaborate table for change. These are the integral levers of change and we know what they feel like, look like and smell like.
VI. Futureproofing “Labs” — Content and Intelligence for a Fast Approaching Future
The Problem Faced: Innovators, change agents and leaders are afflicted with so much glib opinion. Somebody says something smart in a meeting or at a conference, it sounds smart but is it really? Who is an independent arbiter of truth that navigates the current, near and far futures for what’s important?
The “Labs” Solution: Futureproofing Labs has conducted over 30+ deep forensic explorations of various topics over the last decade across change, leadership, innovation, scale and transformation. We’ll be conducting another 5–6 this year and bringing them all together into a book and set of reports. We are perpeully learning, unlearning and relearning, so should you.
The Special FP Sauce: If you want a smart, future-leaning opinion, you don’t ask the average person on the street, you ask the less than 5% of people who are comfortable with ambiguity and can play in a future realm. We have a constantly rotating panel of futureproofers adept at this work and a living “trendbank” of 200 of the most important trends that affect your business. Harness them for your bespoke needs.
VII. The Futureproofing “Distillery “— Bridging the Distance Between Unthinkable & Possible
The Problem Faced: Innovators, change agents and leaders may love a direction, idea or spark of innovation, but who has the where-with-all to pull it off. Frequently, great starts turn into hopeless dead ends looking for a maker, vendor and venturist to partner with.
The “Distillery” Solution: The Futureproofing Distillery holds relationships with regional innovation hubs around the world so you as a company don’t have to accept a less-than-optimal, off-the-shelf solution, but can find a solution tailored to your standards.
The Special FP Sauce: The Futureproofing Distillery keeps open relationships with over 50 leading regional accelerators and incubators around the world and over 100+ freelance/agency vendors to act as your web of venture and solution partners to pull off your next bold move.
VIII. Futureproofing “Forums” — Open & Executive Conversations with the World’s Top Change Voices
The Problem Faced: The challenges innovators, change agents and leaders at an executive level face are not efficiently or easily solved by the corporate shilling, wine-and-cheese or the everybody-has-an-opinion (no matter how lucid or crazy) webinar, social audio or livestream. Important problems require important forums
The “Forums” Solution: Futureproofing Forums provide credible situations for sharing, co-learning and networking that simply aren’t available to executive change agents. We host a network of efficiently run webcasts, events and masterminds that operate at a high level, avoid the vendor chase and deliver the top four things practitioners want (ranked) — fresh perspectives, peer networking, new tips/tactics, investment in career development and accelerated learning.
The Special FP Sauce: The Futureproofing Forums can be, open and by invite only, but are serious discussions inviting the leading voices of the industry into monthly webcast formats, periodic roundtable events and thirty annual masterminds, avoding the biggest sins of nearly every other events we see in the thought leader world: unsubstantiated opinion, lack of original insight, too conceptual without recommendations for action, and promotion of the speaker versus addressing the real, shared problem athand.
IX. Futureproofing 66° — Our Front Row of Innovation+ & Change Champions
The Problem Faced: Innovation leadership, change championship and executive sponsorship can be a lonely frustrating game; we need each other to provide the collective wisdom, shared support, hard-won mentorship/peership and group intelligence that simply doesn’t exist inside companies.
The “66°” Solution: Futureproofing 66° is our club of global all-stars, change talent and passionate collaborators who join us on our odyssey of making change better, bolder, bigger and simpler. We invite well-intentioned people under our umbrella to participate for the collective good in a variety of really stimulating experiences and collaborations.
The Special FP Sauce: Why Futureproofing 66°? well candidly because it sounded cooler than network, but it also alludes to Route 66° and the open road and frontier of discovery and the 66° parallel where the Arctic & Antarctic circles begin — because we all know the great stuff in any industry, almost always starts nearer to the poles than the mainstream. High on insight, steeped in passion, steering away from pretension and low on selfishness — you are the company you keep, and this is the company you want.
X. The Futureproofing “Vault” — A Comprehensive Directory of Resources Designed to Actually Help Change
The Problem Faced: Innovators, change agents and leaders need people on their side willing to work as hard as them at figuring out the future and also willing to share what they know.
The “Vault” Solution: The Futureproofing Vault is the type of resources, landscapes, lists, tools, canvases, graphics, stats and quotes that help you bring innovation to the bank. Available in open, member-only and enewsletter formats, we are always producing the best barometer and gold standards for everything futureproofing and our #Next30 (we’ll cover off our range in a separate post).
The Special FP Sauce: We’ve seen other newsletters and resources, many are quite good, many written by friends and colleagues. The challenge — they are more sizzle than substance. Between a history and litany of initiative above, we sweat the details and the background on our work. Whereas you might like the 5 reasons why your innovation sucks, if you are like us, you like to go deeper than the Buzzfeed-y superficial and would rather have a full forensics on the 11 reasons why, how and what innovation falls short. Futureproofing in not a personal branding platform, growth scheme, it is our obsession & sweat equity and we think it shows in our content.
XI. The “Futureproofing” Awards — Role Models for a Future-Ready Future
The Problem Faced: Innovators, change agents and leaders are blinded to the reality on who is doing great change work in the world. The Webbies awards the best websites, Cannes awards the best films and ads but who out there is awarding the best change work. Silence. Any lists o awards that do touch on change over-indulge Silicon Valley, New York and London. We need a better set of global change role models for us all to strive towards.
The “Futureproofies” Solution: Informally we have proffered up some of the best in the world at change in 2020 & 2021, in November 2022, The Futureproofies will provide a forum to more formally expose and profile the best change companies and personalities in the world across 20+ different categories.
The Special FP Sauce: Collaborative to the core, our 2022 Futureproofies will have nominees and judges from 50+ countries in the world to expose a much wider and geographically dispersed group of virtuosos futureproofers and change alchemists than other shows and galas. You’ll not only find out who they are, but what makes them tick. Given these collaborations, it won’t just be the person that buys their place on the top of the list that wins. To be the best, you have to learn from the best. Citius, Altius, Fortius, In Futurum.
We’ll explore each of these in greater detail in this forum over the next 11 weeks, subscribe to this channel and learn a little bit more about each
Top-of-Mind Futureproofing
Out of labs mentioned above (#VI), Futureproofing is conducting one of the deepest explorations of homes & the entire arena of home life and wants your involvement. We launched our survey this week. The final Report is due by May. If you or anybody you know, understands where the future of homes and home life is going we want you in our collaboration now!
Take the survey: https://bit.ly/projectkoti
What Next:
If any of the above intrigues you, get in touch with us.
Futureproofing — The Future Beyond Innovation
Futureproofing operates as a hub for the future beyond innovation. We conduct 4+ large research intelligence ventures every year.
We believe to be truly effective, helpful and to get companies, teams and people unstuck, we have built out 11 facets to our business operation:
- The Gallery — a full range of 55 change-related keynotes, briefings & workshops ready to inspire and take the first steps
- The Hangar — delivery of the work, selective or end-to-end sprints, experiments and CoLabs which get teams through key hurdles
- The Hatchery — optimizing for better & bolder organization value via business model, value proposition and ecosystem pivots & expansions
- The Academy — creating a training & learning experience to improve the skills, acumen and certification of futureproofers everywhere
- The Refinery — through over a decade of understanding and mapping the drivers of change, expert audits of org., team & personal future-readiness
- Futureproofing Labs — fresh content and expert intelligence for a fast approaching future — reports and research that navigates what’s ahead
- The Distillery — bridging the distance between unthinkable and possible through corporate ventures, partnerships and incubation
- Futureproofing Forums — open & executive-only conversations with the world’s top change voices through webcasts, events & masterminds
- Futureproofing 66° — our front row of innovation+ & change champions, leading executives, passionate collaborators and practitioner innovators
- The Vault — a comprehensive directory of resources designed to actually help change agents via online resources, tools and enewsletters
- The Futureproofing Awards — global role models for a future-ready change and innovation+ across twenty+ different categories
The organization is led by Sean Moffitt, and is supported by a number of leading change agents from around the world.
Interested? Curious? Get in touch with us here.
