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Changing Futures

The world today
The most significant changes affecting organizations know no borders or markets and affect every part of society today. Global trends, uncertainties, and surprises have the potential to significantly change the way the world works tomorrow. Countries, governments, businesses, and institutions continue to witness ever increasing surprise as complexity increases. New surprises impact us far faster, and more profoundly, than we might think, e.g., pandemics, changing weather conditions, terrorist events, health crises, social values, economic and political uncertainties, and technological advances.

Organizations, too, face additional new challenges including:

severe competition
market convergence
new entrants
high volatility in all aspects of their activities

The world tomorrow?

Greater prospects for global, national, and local disruption and shock are increasingly in evidence.
Forecasting models projecting past patterns can therefore no longer be relied upon to predict the future.
An increasing number of drivers are reshaping companies' business contexts.
Drivers include climate change, globalization, new technology, regulatory change, demographics, and new consumer values.
Shaping the world we want to live in means being more aware of the future and seeking better approaches.

Those who spot new trends and exploit them early have competitive advantage over their less prepared rivals. Studies show that those that create or join and leave a new market just before it peaks are those achieving the best performance. How do they do that?

The answer lies in their drive for a more agile and resilience-focused approach to being smart and forward-thinking. They have learned that continually searching for emerging trends, tipping points, and weak signals is a vital intelligence tool to help them survive and thrive in an ever more competitive future. And, looking further afield for experts in academia, NGO’s, commerce, government, and futurists for that intelligence gives them greater insight and earlier warning than their less prepared rivals. Sharing what they know now, in a co-operative manner brings another level of resilience and agility to their organizations tomorrow.

Periodic and episodic analysis is no longer enough to cope with rapid change; real-time recognition, interpretation, and action on issues are required to reduce roadblocks to ongoing competitiveness. Consider those who were prepared for the financial crisis and those who were not!
Recession watch

The prepared and thoughtful sail on, with hardly a mention in the media, while the high profile failures and troubled short-sighted organizations get maximum coverage and brand damage, or are forced to merge or close.

The agile organizations recruit, train, and expect their managers to develop fresh insights about new opportunities and threats. This is done by systematically finding weak signals and amplifying their effect on the future. For example, recognizing that mobile phones will allow society to increasingly communicate with inanimate objects through artificial intelligence means that organizations can use this knowledge to create new products and services and refresh or displace existing offers.

Forward-thinking organizations do not attempt to predict the future but are putting in place holistic systems and processes that anticipate possible futures and determine their response to them. That's because deep understanding of changes across the political, economic, social, and technological fields are required to derive deep understanding and interpretation about future consumer and societal expectations and desires. By better preparing their organizations for change they continuously enhance their agility, capability, and robustness to withstand emerging change and future shocks.

Driving this shift are:

increasing capabilities to monitor, sense, and interpret weak signals.
recognition that more intelligence is less as computing power makes it possible to aggregate and drill down into change observations made by the many.
knowing that the same change observations are collected by organizations and analyzed in almost identical ways even if the emphasis and outcomes of the analysis are entirely different.
the desire to overcome the silo effect of different teams in different parts of the organization not contributing to overall organizational intelligence.
the desire to improve greater efficiency and effectiveness of horizon scanning.
benefits to be had from Web 2.0 technologies in creating collaborative, dynamic, analysis and subsequent innovation.
a need to rapidly respond at the right time to a far wider array of threats and risks.

Cost-effective tools now provide continuous anticipatory intelligence but do not replace sound analysis. Instinct and sound thinking is still required but with a much improved lens and less drudgery than traditional methods.

Changing environment

Agile organizations use what they can see in the fog of the future to determine their way forward, avoiding risks, or using them to advantage, and seizing opportunities ahead of less far-sighted rivals. They continually ask themselves strategic questions to stay ahead of the game such as:

how are customer values changing?
where are the new opportunities for growth?
who might be their new competition?
what competencies will be needed tomorrow?
which capabilities need modifying/strengthening or divesting for the future?
when is the right time to move?

They know that by looking further ahead they can change a vicious reactive cycle to a responsive virtuous circle making their work more satisfying and less wasteful of time and resources.

Common traits across future thinking, innovative, risk aware organisations include:

Strategically and simultaneously focusing on innovation and risk
Systematically gathering fresh insight of the world around them
Collaborating and partnering far beyond traditional commercial boundaries
Using simple, quick processes to reduce cycle times
Measuring and rewarding on a few vital organisational-level metrics.

These leading organisations perspectives on the future assume that:

Greater prospects for global, national and local disruption and shock are increasingly in evidence and will continue for the foreseeable future.
A rapidly increasing number of global drivers are reshaping organisational context.
Forecasting models projecting past patterns can therefore no longer be relied upon to predict the future.
Market convergence, high volatility in all aspects of their activities, severe competition, new entrants, changing societal attitudes and technological progress have great potential to sink the unprepared or represent the next wave of opportunity for leading organisationShaping the world they want to live in, and their organisations role in achieving it, means being more aware of the future and seeking better approaches.

They have learned, over many years, that systematically searching for and analysing emerging trends, tipping points and weak signals is a vital intelligence tool to help them survive and thrive in an ever more competitive future. And, looking further afield for experts in academia, NGO’s, commerce, government and futurists for that intelligence gives them greater insight and earlier warning than their less prepared rivals. Sharing what they know now, in a co-opetitive manner brings another level of resilience and agility to their organisations tomorrow.

Further References
1998: Globalization ... 2008: Continuous Change

Making Complexity Manageable
Bringing Order to Chaos
Foresight and Business Futures (Slideshare: registration required)
Outside In (Slideshare: registration required)
In a Recession Consultants will have to Deliver Almost Instant Results
The Crash Course
The New Age Of Innovation, Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks; Prahalad & Krishnan 2008, McGraw Hill
A Vision for 2012, Planning for Extraordinary Change; John L. Petersen, 2008, Speaker's Corner
What's Next, Rowan Atkinson

Next: Future Practices Back: Home To: Shaping Tomorrow

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thryller	Latest page update: made by thryller , Aug 25 2009, 1:13 PM EDT (about this update About This Update Edited by thryller 5 words added view changes - complete history)
	Keyword tags: Agility Change Competition Disruption Forecast Foresight Futures Organisation Resilience Shock Strategy Tipping point Trends Volatility Weak signal More Info: links to this page

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Mayavan

ref material inaccesible

Aug 19 2009, 1:16 PM EDT by thryller

Thread started: Jul 15 2009, 9:00 AM EDT Watch

I wanted to use the "further references" material but for the Technology Forecast for example Price Waterhouse is keeping me out for not having a subscription to their services. This way the references seem advertisments rather than info sharing. Can we agree to post only references to materials that can actually be consulted?

1 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you?

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