Navigating the Unpredictable: Foresight Prototyping in FigJam for Product Designers & Strategists
Foresight Prototyping is an approach to strategizing the future, in which we don’t predict, but prototype the future. The specific tools can vary, but the prevalent and my personal favorite is Scenario Planning.
In Scenario Planning we’re building four, mutually exclusive, scenarios with uncertain yet impactful key features of the future. To prototype foresight, is to thoroughly imagine and challenge your product and organization in vastly different scenarios and ‘worlds’. It is a powerful tool meant to cover blind spots, kick-start innovation and detect potential challenges you’re unaware off. The method is used with great succes in business, since the 80’s, but I’ve utilized it in product design with great success as well.
The simple to-do looks like this:
- Identify Driving Forces
- Extract Key Factors
- Plot Key Factors
- Expand on Scenarios if needed)
- Discuss Implications
If you’re the type that wanna jump ahead and try it yourself without further instructions, feel free to play around with the FigJam template now; it has some brief instructions to get you started. For an in-depth walkthrough, along with tips, tricks and common pitfalls, I’m laying it all out in this article.
1. Identify Driving Forces
The first step, is a whiteboarding, brainstorming exercise. Ask the question: What big shifts/trends in technology, environment, society, economics, demography, politics, legislation or behaviour are we likely to see in the future, related to your product or organization? I recommend a 10-minute session where each participant can write own their own driving forces, with no collaboration between participants. Then collect all answers and talk through them in relation to your company.
Driving forces should be phrased to fit this sentence:
“A change in <driving force> will have a major impact on our product/organization strategy”.
Examples: Social media consumption, Cost of plastic, AI usage, European inner-market politics, Global shipping costs, Competitive E-sports.
2. Extract Key Factors
Pick two driving forces. Ideally, they are both impactful and uncertain. This can be done in a multitude of ways, and you should consider your team and participants when deciding how to do so. I would usually go through each driving force and put them on a chart with an axis for uncertainty, and an axis for impact. Ideally key factors are driving forces that score high in both categories.
Now, pick two key factors to move along with. They should be phrased to fit “In the future <key factor> or <key factor>”.
Examples of key factors:
Food production prices increase
or
Food production prices decrease
Social media consumption is consolidated to a few platforms
or
Social media consumption is spread to a multitude of platforms
New competing companies emerge
or
Competing companies stays the same
It is vital that they are phrased to be mutually exclusive each other. Now that you have converted two driving forces, into four key factors with high impact and uncertainty, we can move on to the next step.
3. Plot Key Factors
In the Scenario Planning Matrix, insert your key factors so they are on the opposite of each axis, as shown in the example.
In he example the naming is A+C, A+D etc. However since I made the template I’ve found that naming them something more catchy based on their key factors is beneficial in the discourse.
4. (Expand on Scenarios if needed)
This step is depending on the experience and skill of the participants, and the scope of the exercise. For the full benefits, I’ve done writing excesising akin to design methodologies of worldbuilding and storytelling to fully flesh out how we reached these new unpredictable futures. It enhances to thoughts of the participants to imagine, and describe to each other, “how did we get there?” The more immersed your participants are in the scenarios, the more they stand to contribute in the final step.
5. Discuss Implications
Consider the impact of each scenario on your strategy, mission, and goals.
In this step Scenario Planning comes to life as a conversational technique, enabling dialogue and the flow of ideas that would otherwise remain hidden in data-driven analysis, which is exactly what makes Scenario Planning powerful. It stems from the participants expertise, mixed with the imagination and foresight that we’ve been prompting and feeding throughout the exercise.
This also means, that this is where you as the facilitator should really practice the art of listening. Your role here is to write down concerns, solutions, suggestions and notes-of-interest on post-it’s on each scenario. It is to be a synthesizer of the free flow of ideas and conversations that will happen for each scenario.
Conclusion
I hope that I have inspired you to try Foresight Prototyping with Scenario Planning. As a product designer or strategist, this approach equips you with a powerful tool to navigate uncertainty, foster innovation, and adapt to the ever-changing future. By thoroughly imagining and challenging your products and organization in different scenarios, you can gain valuable insights that will help you make informed decisions and proactively shape your future success.
So, don’t hesitate to dive into Scenario Planning and experience the benefits it offers. Let you and your team’s imagination soar, push the boundaries of what’s possible, and discover new paths to the future. The journey may be unpredictable, but with Foresight Prototyping and Scenario Planning, you have the tools to navigate it with confidence and creativity.
