Futures thinking can greatly aid in the efficacy of your business' strategic planning sessions.
Thinking about the future has been framed as a fun exercise. But academic research and experts on the future (called futurists) think shifting to a longer-term frame of reference can help an organization create a competitive advantage.
Research On Corporate Foresight
Professor René Rohrbeck and Deloitte consulting’s Ménès Etingue Kum research into corporate foresight has compelling findings indicating future preparedness to be a powerful predictor for becoming an outperformer in an industry, for attaining superior profitability, and for gaining superior market capitalization growth.
Rohrbeck, a professor of strategy at the Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences in Demark, teamed with Ménès when he was getting his Ph.D on a study on what they call corporate foresight. Before joining Aarhus University, Rohrbeck spent six years in industry and worked on innovation management at Volkswagen and corporate foresight at Deutsche Telekom.
Rohrbeck and Kum’s study set out to see if corporate foresight would help firms break away from path dependency, help decision-makers to define superior courses of action, and ultimately enable superior firm performance. Their study looked at several companies’ undertaking of corporate foresight as a core capability, including Cisco, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, L’Oréal, and Pepsi.
As part of their research, the duo developed a model to measure the future preparedness of firms in 2008. They then followed up to see if a company’s corporate foresight had a positive impact on performance in 2015.
Their findings revealed a strong correlation with performance and long-term thinking, showing that organizations that recognize the future might change the very foundation of their businesses are 33% more profitable and achieve a 200% higher growth rate than the average company that does not. In the study they also calculate the average bonus/discount that can be expected by sufficiently/insufficiently future-prepared firms.
The Need for Futures Thinking
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated supply chain crisis have left many companies wondering how they could have been more prepared. The fast pace of emerging technologies also plays a factor. More business leaders are asking fundamental questions about what might come in the next few decades and how they should respond — either with new services and products or new ways of working.
They’re also using this as an opportunity to get more creative and curious when setting out a bolder organizational vision and undertaking strategic planning that delivers the benefit in the long term as well as closer objectives relating to growth and revenues.
But it’s not that simple …
Our futures are complex and broad. There are structural and technological dynamics as much as there are cultural shifts and societal evolutions. Thinking about our futures and exploring possibilities is the must-have capability for executives and creative leadership in 2023.
Leading executives in organizations are now waking up to realize the value in being curious, igniting imagination, and speculating about the future. Futurist Nikolas Badminton refers to businesses that can shift their mindsets from ‘what is’ to ‘what if’ as having a superpower.
Says Badminton, “There is a superpower that comes with curiosity and wonder which helps fuel thinking about what comes in 10, 20 and even 50-plus years.”
Unlocking the Superpower of Corporate Foresight
To unlock this superpower, Badminton shares eight ways for executives to help kickstart this shift in his book, “Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth.”
1) Question your own history. It’s fine to reference what’s occurred in the past in order to rewrite your assumptions. Deeply consider the impact of your personal and organizational agendas and broaden your thinking.
2) Practice curiosity and be courageous. Share your true thoughts in lively discussions at the executive level and with people across the organization.
3) Get comfortable with ambiguity and multiple perspectives. Make time to seek out others' ideas and listen carefully to what they have to say with an open heart and mind. Collaboratively, explore multiple openings and pathways from initial ideals.
4) Suspend judgment. Follow the cognitive process and a rational state of mind where you actively withhold ethical judgments. Be aware of prejudgments and bias, as these will lead you to drawing conclusions or making a judgment before having the futures narrative and all information at hand. Decisions don’t need to be made. Instead, focus on tabling ideas for the future.
5) Be (wildly) creative. Work fast and write down as many ideas as possible from both the possible to the preposterous. Don’t discredit any presented solutions. Discuss all ideas with your group and/or colleagues and combine ideas to form new ones. Then consider their impact in 10, 20 and 50+ years.
6) Look for “pockets of the future” in the present. This is an idea originally from Denise Worrell. Look to poets, philosophers, writers, musicians and counter-culture creators for inspiration. Also, listening to children’s naive ideas can help you get creative about where society’s headed.
7) Embrace the long view. If your work is starting to regress into strategic planning (think three- to five-year plans), it’s time to reset your target horizons and goals for future work. When you push your thinking out 100, 200, even 500+ years, all change is possible.
8) Focus on the non-zero-sum game. Ensure the ideas and futures you explore are places where multiple people win, as opposed to the winner taking all. That is the game-changer for the entire world — all boats rise with the tide.
There’s much to learn and master when it comes to corporate foresight …
Of course you can continue as you have been, but remember: The strategic decisions you make today create the future ahead as much as those that do the work of strategic foresight. The difference is that you will not have a say in your role in said future.
