Answer These 10 Questions to Find Out How Future-Ready You Are.

Here's a list of 10 great questions to assess how future ready you and your company are. If you answer more than two questions negatively, or don't have an answer yet, please consider taking a day or two off to rethink your strategy.

Are you truly committed to being an innovative company?

1) How important is innovation for your company? What's meant here is, are you truly committed to being an innovative company? Do you want to be a a game-changer, someone whose methods might even become the new industry practice OR are you just following and trying to keep up? In the first you’re acting, in the second you’re reacting. Both ways you might survive, both ways will be exhausting but the second is driven by fear and is not fun at all!

?2) How much creativity & originality is really allowed at your company? Again, this point is about the commitment and about establishing a culture where people will present even the boldest ideas that might challenge common beliefs in an industry or established business models. It's not only about the possibility to speak up, but also about the reactions people get after having spoken. Think about Kodak: those guys had discovered digital photography but killed that project because they were in the business of selling analogue photography equipment and films, and the teams that presented the digital film was ridiculed! Common beliefs and expertise do help us make quick and informed decisions but we need to be careful that they don’t become an obstacle on our way to innovating.?Also watch out the group think in your teams, as it can easily end up in a kind of office mob!

3) How do you recognize and honor great ideas? What do you do with ideas that were not so good? In sciences, there are various journals of negative results. Because sometimes it’s not about having a great idea, but it’s about having it at the right time, too. If an idea doesn’t work at a certain time period, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work 10 years later. So keep them at your disposal.

If an idea doesn’t work at a certain time period, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work 10 years later.

4) Are the hierarchies in your company permeable? How powerful are your gate-keepers? Can everyone really contribute or do you actually have “official innovators” like the CEO or CIO and the “others”, the official creatives and the others. And the rest is just working bees. Innovation & creativity is everyone’s job. Think about apple: yes, they had new products but they also had a whole new approach to things surrounding the product such as packaging, retail or customer service.

Do you lose your best people? What are they doing now?

5) Do you lose your best people? What are they doing now? Although there’s a common belief that people don’t leave jobs but their boss, according to studies, most people leave their job when the job isn’t enjoyable and doesn't provide any meaningful occupation where their strengths are used, and they can grow in their careers. Paul English, the guy who started Kayak among other platforms, used to work at a venture capital firm, before he quit (Kayak was sold for 1,8 billion). Now, he’s a billionaire but still eager to learn. So he goes and drives uber in the nights in Boston, to get the pulse of the real people and to understand what they really need!

6) Do your structures allow interdepartmental collaboration & communication? Do people from different backgrounds regularly meet and talk to each other? This is self explanatory. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel each time. Lack of communication is the biggest efficiency killer!?

Lack of communication is the biggest efficiency killer!?

7) Is there any room for experiments? Great ideas don’t necessarily need huge resources. At least at the beginning. Remember, many big companies started with very little money in a garage... One of them, google, had this 80/20 rule in the early days: so that you could spend 20% of your time for experimental projects that are dear to you. Googlemaps and gmail emerged as side projects out of this practice.?Google killed this practice a few years ago -along with their "don't be evil slogan", many say now that google became just another corporation...

8) Do you regularly leave and force others too, to leave their comfort zone? If we want to stay fresh and creative, we need to bring ourselves to get out of the comfort zone and open up for things that are not familiar. The US designer Ralph Osterhaut has a good tip. He regularly goes to a kiosk to read some obscure magazines, just like Paul English who drives uber, to remain at the pulse of the time and to see what people care about and need.

9) Foresight teams? In Europe there’s a huge tendency right now to build dedicated corporate foresight teams to sniff the future trends. Daimler, Deutsche Telekom, BASF, Evonik have all built such teams. These teams usually not only consist of the company intern members, but they are pretty diverse. They consist of social scientists, people from arts & design even sports. The media company Axel Springer organizes hack days, gadget days, entrepreneurs days where internal and external people can take part in the innovation process.

It is simply a dumb thing to do to ignore certain technologies such as blockchain or web3 because of hearsay.

10) Are you taking Tech literacy seriously? It is simply a dumb thing to do to ignore certain technologies such as blockchain or web3 because of hearsay. Do not put your head into the sand and hope that things will pass by. Doing executive seminars and crash courses in blockchain, web3, NFTs and AI became an integral part of our work at the Mindshift. Find people whom you trust to walk you through some of these applications and their implications for your specific case. And, if you don’t know anyone, we're here to help.

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About the Mindshift.Global

The Mindshift.Global is a unique consultancy firm with a specialization around leadership and communications for innovation and technology driven companies. We have already helped numerous executives unleash the potential of new technologies, tell inspiring stories and successfully master transition and cultural transformation processes in their organizations. Please get in touch to see how we can help you, too: [email protected]