Increase Your Speed to Change Using Foresight

A globally active virus has forced us to think differently about how we live, work, shop, eat, pay, travel and generally consume. And, it did that seemingly overnight. Many people and organizations didn’t have time to think about how they would change — they just did. Because they had to.

Change is normally slow. It takes time and requires people to evolve. Businesses usually look at change as something you manage. Something that happens through force of will. Making an edict that processes or behavior will change and then guiding people through that change until it becomes the new normal.

But when something like COVID-19 makes change mandatory for the preservation of our health and lives, change happens instantly. Almost before we recognize it as change. As businesses were forced to close, they had to quickly facilitate work-from-home capabilities — technology, policies and processes. Retail and hospitality businesses have had to instantly reconsider their business models. Technology businesses have had to scale their capacity to meet the needs of employees working remotely. Those that aren’t quickly changing, are getting left behind. It’s a 21st century version of ‘survival of the fittest’.

How Change is Changing

Change is no longer something you manage in the moment, but something you must actively prepare for.

To actively prepare for change means thinking about the future. And, not the future 1–2 years from now, like most strategic planning work. But, the future that we can’t yet see. The future that is sending us weak signals right now through the trends we can see. For instance, AI (artificial intelligence) is a trend happening now, being used for everything from support bots to predictive modeling. If we see what is happening today with this trend, businesses might start asking themselves, what does that mean for how work will get done in the future? How will this impact the way our customers purchase our products? How will it change how we consume information? What are the implications of this change 5, 10 and 20 years from now?

Businesses today may not have answers to these questions, but just by exploring them, discussing them, identifying the patterns and modeling future scenarios, they will be able to plan for today more strategically. This discipline is called Strategic Foresight. It’s a methodology that uses data we have today to define implications and imagine the world of tomorrow. Then taking that world and backcasting it to get to a plan for the things we need to do today.

Change becomes the pull of the future helping you pull your business forward, rather than a force that hits you unexpectedly, throwing you off balance.

How to Increase Your Speed to Change

1. Scan the environment for what’s happening today. Don’t limit your scanning to just within your business or industry. Look for signals of change in your macro environment too. What’s happening in the world from a social (e.g. social distancing), technological (e.g. remote collaboration), environmental (e.g. climate change), economic (e.g. lack of demand for travel) and political (e.g. global transparency) perspective? This broader scanning allows you to see macro trends that point to bigger patterns — like the possibilities of a global pandemic (experts in global health have seen this coming and predicted we wouldn’t be ready for it).

2. Define the implications of what you’re seeing. Think about the possible implications of the trend or pattern of trends 1–5 years out, then the implications of those implications 5–10 years out. Then the implications of those implications 10+ years out. This takes imagination. It takes creativity. It also requires you to suspend your biases or understanding of the world today. This is hard work, but a very important step to planning for change.

3. Build your possible scenarios. Based on the implications you have identified, outline three possible worlds that could emerge: the worst-case-scenario or dystopian world, the market-driven world, and the transformational world. Build out the stories of what these worlds look like — the social, political, environmental, economic and technological characteristics they demonstrate as a result of the change. This exercise is not for the faint of heart. But it is critical to defining the dimensions of change to plan for, giving your company a target for strategic planning.

4. Take action today based on your future scenarios. This is where your strategic plan should start — from the future. With a clearer idea of possible future scenarios, you can identify specific strategies to focus on that will help your organization transition into the future along with possible timelines for change.

Jumping into the future to create your strategic plan for today helps you facilitate the process of change. By envisioning the possible future worlds in full detail, you are creating the case for change. By mapping out the path to get there, you are communicating the change needed and setting expectations for when and how change will happen. All of this helps build a culture of change within your organization. And, by building a culture that understands, accepts and facilitates change — you are increasing your speed to change.

Need strategic planning help?

Slalom works with our clients to help them identify the weak signals of the future, define the implications of these signals, and develop future scenarios to help them create strategic plans that increase their speed of change. It’s a model for strategic planning that will enable the change your business needs to be ready for the next global, life-changing event.

Let us know how we can help.