workshops

Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future

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No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be…This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking 

–Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Science Fiction 1981

Organizations have to consider outside forces and trends as they build their strategies. But in most, too few people spend time thinking about how the future will shape the organization. Not enough of the knowledge and ideas of the organization finds its place in strategy. Leading firms use scenarios to solve these problems.

A science fictional way of thinking

Scenarios answer Asimov’s call for a “science fictional way of thinking”. They ask, “What if?” They are stories we build about future possibilities. The stories let us test and explore future risks and opportunities. 

The scenario building process draws out the insight of a team and helps make future challenges and opportunities clearer and more compelling. It gives participants a shared view of future possibilities. That view enriches their day-to-day work and strategic thinking.

We can use scenarios to think through potential decisions about strategy. The scenarios also become a tool for sharing strategic thinking with others. 

Most organizations have a good idea what they intend to do in the next few years. But that view can weaken their sense of more transformational change and bigger opportunities further out. Taking a look ten or even more years out lets us imagine bigger change. Then we can step back to today to understand what to do about it. 

The further into the future we look, the less certain we are about what will happen. But also, the further out we look the more our decisions today have the power to shape change and opportunity. 

This diagram shows how using scenarios can help us avoid just pursuing an “official” future. Official futures usually assume continuity. They tend to ignore both new threats and opportunities. Good foresight, exploring alternate scenarios, builds and maintains a broader view of what’s possible. 

Cone of uncertainty

Scenario building is a shared, immersive activity

The power of scenario building is in how it gets people to immerse themselves in the future. Working on scenarios leaves them no choice but to think both broadly and concretely about the future.

Once people have had the scenario-building experience, they have new ideas and places to go in their heads. They’ve got a much richer view of the future. They have a new mental habit–to think about alternative futures, not accepting that there’s some inevitable future out there. They should, and usually do, have a sense of empowerment. They discover there are parts of their future they can shape, starting now.

By the way, part of my practice is helping teams use scenarios. So, to be clear, I not only want you to do this, I’d love to help. We build scenario programs for all sorts of organizations. Here’s a page describing our support for workforce futures explorations.

Let me know if I can help you: jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz and 202-271-0444.

Some of my other posts on scenarios:

Don’t be a sheep in wolf’s clothing

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That's the past, no the futureIf you say you are going to take a look at the future, you should mean it. Far too often, organizations put together a program called, "The future of ____________" But then they build something that is, at best, about what's going on today.

That's a missed opportunity and it's false advertising!

I have just been the victim of one of these frauds. At a big, well-funded, and well-attended seminar called "The Office of the Future," I was subjected to, merely, a pretty good run-down on the office of the present. At best it included a few big trends in commercial office space. But it was not what they said it would be. What a wasted opportunity. It could have delivered folks true insights on what is around the corner, just out of sight, and likely to shape their destiny in 10 and 20 years.

One speaker went so far as to ridicule some of the big trends in commercial offices and business, especially telework. By mocking it, he effectively negated anyone's motivation to consider what it means to office development, planning, and design. He set a key future force aside, preferring to talk about the present at the expense of the future.

What a wasted opportunity!

The event I attended was for the real estate sector. This is a sector that includes developers, who make investments and build projects that are to last and be profitable for decades. It's a sector that includes tenants who pay a lot of money to find, fit out, and move into real estate, and who sign leases for ten years, and usually hope to renew those leases for longer. It's a sector that is served by office furniture makers who sell complex and expensive fittings for offices that take them time to design and market–they want and need payoffs over years, if not decades. And its a sector with big technology players who make and service the networks, security, lighting, etc. that enliven and energize offices-They too make bets, launch product development efforts and market with the need and hope that they have years, maybe decades of profits from their efforts.

At today's conference, none of these players were served very well. They may have gotten a taste of what their competitors are doing, what vendors are offering, what tenants are looking for, but all those with the lens of right now.

Cutting edge, maybe, but future? No.

Image: www.history,navy.mil

Two sides of foresight work

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Two Sides of ForesightOver a long time as a futurist, I have come to look at futures work as having two sides: analysis and experience.

That is a hard won and only recently-clear conclusion. I think it's valuable to think about the difference, and the critical need for both sides, for doing good foresight work, for dealing with different kinds of thinkers and learners, and for being effective in communicating with others. 

Here's how I see it: exploring the future depends on, and benefits powerfully from wide-ranging research, close analysis of what we know, careful consideration of what is more and less certain and what is wholly uncertain, the comparison of alternate scenarios, and so on. We cannot be futurists without putting effort into that work. That is our analysis work. It is, in fact, what most futurists I know do best. (It involves plenty of creative effort as well–don't take the word "analysis" too narrowly.)

But, analysis alone is not all that we need. Too often, especially with today's availability of information, the work of analysis consumes us. We also need to have, and foster in others, experiences in exploring the future. Our careful analysis is unlikely to be wholly successful if we fail to give people some chance to do their own thinking about the future. That is central to effective work with groups. It is also a part of how we need to approach sharing ideas about the future with others. Giving people a futures experience through images, stories, and the chance to question, challenge, and interact, make all the difference in getting through to them with new ideas. 

In working on the future, we have to consider our work incomplete if we have only done our careful research and analysis. We have to give the experience side our best creative attention as well. We need to guard time for "playing" in the future–to come with ideas about future possibilities–without an over-concern about plausiblity, liklihood, or data. We need to let the creative ideas flow. Analysis by itself does not get us where we need to go.

Here's one approach that futurists use, as an example. Working with a group, choose a year ten years or more in the future, for example 2024–fifteen years from now. Have groups of 5 or 8 people spend time coming up with newspaper headlines from that year. (Nevermind that we may not have newspapers by then, the front page is a familiar concept for people to play with.) Have them draw front pages on flip charts and then share them with the other groups. The headline creation gets people's playful juices going, and brings out people's assumptions about the future. It gives them a chance to play with ideas about the future, rather than just sitting hearing someone else's ideas. It moves them toward stories from the future, rather than just extrapolated trend data, or technical concepts. 

There are lots of techniques like this, and you can create your own. Just be sure they help you break away, sometimes, from just doing analysis, when what you also need is some experiences.

Make it worth the journey

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I spend a lot of time thinking about effective communication in exploring the future, and have posted a number of entries on it (see: communication). Every time I give a talk or lead a workshop, I try to up my game and reflect on how it went, what worked, and what didn’t. I consider the attendees time precious and I don’t want to waste it. The event is for them, not me, and I tell them that.

With this in mind, I really liked Seth Godin’s riff on effective communication on his blog. Godin is, to oversimplify, an author and marketing guru.

Initially considering presentations, he insists we have to get way beyond an information role. His view is that an attendee has to get  more from a talk than she would just by reading the transcript. Thus his title, “I flew here for this?”

Godin says that “a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement.” In presenting on the future, we need to draw on those things to get through to people and to make it worth their time to pay attention to us. In my experience, that means our role is to offer insights and an experience that gets people thinking and gives them something new to think about. We don’t bring everything that’s needed for a rich new conversation on the future, but we bring the vital ingredients, and we catalyze new thinking.

Ultimately, Godin reaches the conclusion:

“The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!” 

Well put!

Giving presentations on the future

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And now for something completely different…..

I regularly give talks on the future. I’ve spoken to groups from second grade to senior citizens. I have given talks to members of dozens of professions, in different industries, and in different countries. I have evolved my approach over the years in an effort to make it work as well as possible for people.

Speaking is work I enjoy very much. Getting a group excited about the future is fun and rewarding.

In many ways, when you present on the future, you are lucky. The future is a star. Lots of people are interested in hearing about it, and there is a lot to tell. Nearly everyone sees its relevance, and even if they don’t, there’s a lot to entertain people about the future.

Fairly often, I speak to a corporate group during a quarterly or annual meeting. I’ve seen the great contrast in those gatherings between what the company’s executives must talk about, and what I get to talk about. Their PowerPoint shows are filled with spreadsheets and pie charts–a focus on market share, profitability, and so on. That’s their job, and the meeting needs that information.

When it’s my turn, I usually feel the urge to say “and now for something completely different.” Sometimes, but not always, my host has made sure the group’s expectations about what I am there for are clear. I always clarify my role and make sure to read the comfort and readiness of the group as I get started.

I tell them: “my role is to share some insights about the future with you. I have chosen carefully what to share, and have worked to be sure what I have to say is important to your business. Your role is to find connections to what I have to say, and to add your knowledge and wisdom to it. You don’t have to agree with me, but I hope you’ll react, one way or another.”

Then I move into my talk. I work to make it as powerful, but also as useful as possible. I believe that to adequately inspire people to think about the future I need to do several critical things:

  • Give people insights in their language and in ways that are accessible to them. That depends on the person, so I know that there will be auditory and visual learners with me, and there will be people who must have data, and others who benefit from an experiential process. I also need to know where they are coming from-to understand their interests and sensitivities.
  • Find a balance between the familiar and the new. That means approaching the new ideas in a language that ties things to the interests of the group in front of me. The futurist’s instinct is not always to do that-it feels like dumbing things down or pulling punches. It’s not. I can show mind-bending things to a group, but then be sure to say, “so that means…” and make near-term and concrete connections to their business.
  • Make it visual. I’ve written several times here about the power of images. See here. Images make a big difference in presenting on the future. If nothing else, they liven up a session, and contrast well with the steady diet of quarterly data tables that executives get.
  • Tell stories. Stories cut across a range of disparate ideas and facts, and can give people a clearer view of the future. That may, of course, mean sharing some well-fleshed-out scenarios of possible futures.
  • Model the right kind of thinking and behavior-which means getting people to “play” with the future, trying out ideas, speculating, and making new connections. This is the kind of thinking they need to make a habit in their day-to-day work.
  • Make the time I spend their time. That means structuring the presentation as a dialogue as much as possible. It means stopping as often as every 10 or 15 minutes for discussion, a question, a chance for those attending to jot a note down, to capture what their thoughts are. What matters in the time I am in front of a group is not so much what I want to say, as it is what they latch onto and combine into their thinking.

It is my hope that you can find some useful thoughts in what I’ve just shared. I don’t claim to have it all figured out, but I’ve moved a long way over the years in finding better ways to bring people insights on the future.

What are we talking about here?

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It’s hard to open up a discussion about the future and not put most everything on the table for reconsideration. When the way is clear to do that, great, go for it! But so often, the charge to the group exploring the future is to move more incrementally: find new opportunities for growth, is a common charge among our clients. We are usually not reconsidering everything, we are exploring options for a part of the system, such as a product group, a market, or a division of the company.

But, as I’ve seen again and again with my clients, it is hard to keep things contained. You’ll find groups you work with discover pretty quickly that they are talking about bigger things than they thought. Recently, at a corporate workshop I helped lead, the group discovered, as they explored the future for market growth opportunities, that the very culture and nature of their company had to change. That insight was profound and scary to them, and they will have a tough job going forward.

You will often have to go back to the leadership and get their blessing to open up the question, involve more people from a wider range of functions and divisions. Initial expectations, rather than being successfully met, may get blown away. Be prepared to discover something other than what you thought you were looking for. Then be prepared to communicate that discovery to others, and get others on board for greater change.

You will find it valuable, and often essential, to have your leadership be part of the process. Too often, those not participating in a futures exploration are not ready to hear and grasp the discoveries the group made. So when you get ready to explore the future, take a hard look at what’s on the table for change. Be ready to answer the question: “what are we talking about here?”

Mrs. Waters knows best

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Monica Waters was the kindergarten teacher for both my boys at Janney Elementary School in Washington, DC. I learned a critical lesson from her, which I have used ever since when I run a workshop. I was planning a visit to her kindergarten class some years ago to lead an activity for the children. Mrs. Waters told me, “Mr. Mahaffie, you’ve got to have a plan for when you come in here. Know what you are going to do. And Mr. Mahaffie, there is every chance that you will have to drop the whole plan.” She couldn’t have said it better.

My experience is that every futures session has to be extremely carefully thought out and there is method required in all of them. But things can and do change, in real time. And groups need permission to break the rules you have set. There is nothing worse than a facilitator or workshop leader who won’t bend to the situation at hand.

So we think on our feet. And while keeping up with the group, we have to be aware of ourselves falling into the trap of defending a moribund process. “Trying to win” I call it. We can’t abandon our core purpose, which is to help a group explore the future. But we have to expect sometimes to abandon our carefully-thought-out process plans for something new, in real time. Otherwise, we’re asserting some need of our own on the group, and not making the situation work for them.

Avoiding “fire, ready, aim”

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Good foresight is part of ensuring that an organization doesn’t act before it thinks. It’s essential to try to understand the present and future conditions the organization faces. We want to avoid “fire, ready, aim” and try to be sure we know what else is changing around us and what future we’re facing before taking action. [See “Execute, Yes, but Execute for the Future”]

For this reason, Leading Futurists LLC tries to work carefully with clients to help them fit foresight into their organizational processes.

It would be fantastic to have futures thinking pervade the organization—that is the theme of this blog and is what “foresight culture” means.  But as a practical matter, most big organizations will only find time and resources to give the future explicit attention at certain times and places. How can you make the best choices about that, and make what effort and resources you can give go farthest? Here are some central considerations:

  • Readiness: of the group or team to open up their thinking, seize on new insights, and put them to work in the organization’s thinking and strategy. A work team and its leadership need to explicitly discuss and agree on a process that welcomes new ideas, including ones from outside their usual view of things and often, outside their comfort zones.
  • Timeliness: Efforts in exploring longer-term forces and trends, and their implications should come early enough in a planning cycle, in strategy building, and in the innovation process to benefit the processes. We don’t want to look at the future after developing strategies and action plans, for example, when the futures view would very likely have shaped the plans differently.
  • Regularity–so that thinking about the future isn’t so rare as to be unfamiliar and uncomfortable when it happens. Regular, ideally, means always. But if the organization is not going to make foresight an explicit part of its efforts all the time, there should at least be an annual process of enquiring comprehensively into the big forces and trends shaping the business.
  • Prominence. That enquiry should be a prominent and widely-shared effort, so that the most possible numbers of people benefit from insights on the future and can share, in return, their ideas on the implications for the business of the emerging future.

We have found that our efforts on the future for organizations are most valuable when they are part of a “zero stage” in the planning, strategymaking, or innovation process. That means part of the exploratory work done first, in “opening up the question,” and ahead of the usual organizational process stages.

So here’s where you might “put” the foresight part:

  • Day one, in the morning, of the corporate strategic planning meetings
  • In the briefing and background work in advance of a strategy process
  • In the early stages of assembling an ad hoc team to explore a new issue or opportunity area, after sufficient team building, but before the team narrows its focus to key organizational issues and challenges
  • In a meeting/workshop with vendors or customers, to ensure that more of your stakeholders are along for the ride with you in exploring the future, and that they are aware of where your new ideas come from
  • As an ongoing effort to fuel and R&D team’s thinking on emerging opportunity areas, as a part of regular team meetings, or as regular electronic briefing by email or newsletter
  • As a group blog topic shared by a work team or across a cross-functional group
    As a comprehensive exploration and analysis of the future of a critical topic: a sector, technology area, etc. with reports done in the lead up to big organizational initiatives
  • As an annual environmental scan for issues, trends, and opportunities, aimed at informing leadership and strategymaking at all levels.

Most often, a good exploration of the emerging future shapes directly the question of what should be on the table for consideration. We don’t want to fire first and aim later.

Fighting back for foresight

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With great regularity, journalists and other writers pen pieces on the decline of futures or on failed predictions. Our professional futurist colleagues have often boiled this down to a shorthand: “where’s my flying car?”

We have often joined our colleagues in the Association of Professional Futurists (www.profuturists.org) to compile responses to these pieces. The World Future Society (www.wfs.org) also works hard to counter misperceptions about futurists and foresight work. Most in the field feel that the field is doing well, and that attention to the future is improving around the world. That many of our colleagues in organizations have futures job titles and responsibilities is good evidence for that.

At Leading Futurists LLC we believe foresight is doing well, but that we have more battles yet to fight. The value proposition of the field is changing from provocative “out there” thinking to ideas about change that organizations can respond to today.

Foresight and futures thinking tools are becoming part of everyday strategy making in organizations. Futures-minded people serve on or consult to teams as the people who understand the inevitability of change and what it means to the organization. They bring a knowledge base about the future to bear on an organization’s strategies and actions.

But though foresight is gaining ground, in too many organizations short-term thinking reigns, and it dominates in society overall. We battle the widespread conviction that what is relevant is the immediate scene; this quarter’s performance and today’s issues. Short-term thinking is a condition of organizational life, and it will drive out habitual foresight, if we let it. So let’s get to work on the problem.

Making foresight a daily habit of more people in more organizations is a new kind of work. It is different from just being provocative and wowing an audience with gee whiz ideas about startling new technologies. Here’s what we need to do instead:

  • Keep the future on the agenda, bring up trends and themes of change in work meetings and planning sessions
  • Change what people expect when you talk about the future from the gee whiz, to useful, actionable ideas about emerging challenges and opportunities
  • As you get a new insight on the future from your scanning, think about who the 5 or 6 people in your organization are who you know should see it. Send it along to them with a comment or interpretation. Any busy colleague will appreciate it.
  • Show people how to think about change. Model this by giving people an image of the future that relates to a question they are grappling with. For example, in the packaging sector, you imagine for them a near term future in which every package has a radio-frequency ID tag on it for automated inventory and checkout.

These are some of the things to do to normalize foresight and make it a daily habit in your organization. They are steps toward truly having a Foresight Culture.

Breaking out of your specialty for better foresight

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Professionals and executives face a danger of narrow thinking. As they gain expertise and knowledge specific to their operations, products, and so on, executives’ attention can narrow to just the essential things they must focus on. They understandably go to conferences, visit facilities, invite in vendors, etc. in areas tightly connected to their day-to-day responsibilities.

In this highly responsible and understandable behavior, they are actually doing themselves and their organizations harm. They are perfecting their capacities in dealing with present day needs—the current line of products or services, tweaks they might make to it, and, at best keeping an eye out for alternatives—probably cheaper—for what they offer now.

Their behavior is like that of an air traffic controller who has his/her eyes on the tarmac but not on regional radar—you know what’s here, maybe what’s scheduled, but not what might arrive from elsewhere.

The business executive has to have two radar screens. On one is the current operation and the forces and factors shaping it. The other screen is for the long view—those things outside the current realm of activity—including outside of the current business—that could or will become important.

So the role for foresight in the organization is to help people switch on and understand that second radar screen. You need to work hard to get people to look beyond their usual boundaries and see what might become important later. Often that means knowing about social change, new technology, and new business practices that are not yet a part of their business. You can literally draw that radar screen for your colleagues, and have them help you think about what should be on it. It may help to draw the existing view, and compare the two.

Futures tools and techniques are all about doing expanding thinking onto that second radar screen. Futures work involves presentation/workshops that deliver insights for the second radar screen—what’s happening that is not yet adequately part of a group’s thinking. We work through that to also get people to surface their assumptions about the future. We get them to finding meaning—they are the experts after all—in emerging trends and issues in the world. If you focus on those needs in your organization, and assign yourself the foresight role, you can help open up the thinking, and help your organization build a stronger foresight culture.

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