Building Future Readiness - Our New Online Course

'Your organisation may not be interested in global trends, but global trends are very much interested in your organisation. Leaders can allow world events to dictate the impact on their organisation or pre-emptively adjust to a rapidly changing world. The starting point in pre-emptively adjusting and building a future-ready organisation is to know your starting point.'

Introduction

Our new executive-level online course equips you with the knowledge, tools, and frameworks for understanding a VUCAD* world, identifying opportunities and threats, and evaluating your organisation's readiness to respond.

*Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous and Digital.

By exploring key issues such as sensemaking, digital landscape analysis, radical scenario planning, and future readiness assessment, the short course provides a solid foundation for developing a future-ready strategy and roadmap for your organisation and for you personally as a forward-looking leader.

'Stop & Reflect' self-evaluation and Gen AI-supported exercises provide a highly practical, action-learning-based approach allowing you to customise and personalise the learning experience to suit your specific needs.

Course content can also be used to support your own senior executive and leadership development programmes.

About the Course

The course comprises five short modules as follows:

Module 1: Sensemaking

Sensemaking is the process of understanding and making sense of a complex, ambiguous, and uncertain environment. Module 1 discusses how to implement an agreed-upon approach to monitoring the disruptive trends impacting your industry. Using Gen AI-supported exercises, you will evaluate the extent to which your industry is under threat of being disrupted and the potential impact on your organisation.

Key topics covered in the module include:

• Identify and track disruptive trends in your industry.
• Assess the potential impact of these disruptive trends - the 'length of the fuse' and 'size of the bang'.
• Evaluate the potential impact of disruption on your own organisation.
• Complete your Gen AI Exercise for Module 1 - the main disruptive trends impacting your industry.

Module 2: Digital Landscape Analysis

The rapid convergence of a broad range of disruptive technologies continues to reshape industries and competition at an unprecedented pace. Adopting a similar approach to the above, Module 2 focuses specifically on digital disruption. You will explore the main disruptive technologies impacting your industry, now and in the near future; evaluating the opportunities and threats for your organisation in three critical areas: customer engagement, internal operations, and business model reinvention.

Key topics covered in this module include:

• The convergence of disruptive technologies.
• External Digital: The impact of digital disruption on your organisation's approach to customer engagement, sales, marketing, and PR
• Internal Digital: The impact of digital disruption on internal operations, including streamlining and automating processes, deriving actionable insights from data, supporting new modern ways of working, etc.
• The impact of disruptive technologies on your underlying business model.

Complete your Gen AI Exercise for Module 2 - the digital technologies disrupting your industry.

Module 3: Radical Scenario Planning

Gen AI tools have revolutionised scenario planning by enabling the immediate generation of multiple scenarios for the future. In this module, you will learn how to use Gen AI tools to develop five or more radical scenarios for the future of your industry. The objective of these scenarios is to challenge conventional thinking, providing a strong foundation for a range of possible futures.

Key topics covered in this module include:

• Understand the concept of radical scenario planning and its benefits.
• Explore Gen AI tools and their role in scenario planning.
• Generate five radical scenarios for the future of your industry.
• Analyse the implications of each scenario for your organisation.
• Build the foundation for responding effectively to each scenario.
• Complete your Gen AI Exercise for Module 3 - build radical scenarios for the future of your industry.

Module 4: Future Readiness Assessment

Module 4 focuses on the key issues you would cover in conducting an honest self-evaluation of your organisation's future readiness: strategy, organisation, people, culture, digital mastery, orchestration, and leadership.

Key topics covered in the module include:

• Assess the alignment of your current strategy and underlying business model with future trends and challenges.
• Evaluate your organisation's structure, processes, and capabilities for future readiness.
• The future-ready gap that exists in your organisation's approach to people, talent and skills development.
• Is your organisational culture future-ready?
• The scope for improvement that exists in your organisation's digital mastery.
• Does your organisation have the orchestration dexterity to drive transformational change?
• Is your organisation's leadership future-ready?
• Complete your Future Readiness Assessment Exercise - is your organisation future ready?

Module 5: Next Steps

Building on the above, what are the next steps you and your organisation should take in building future readiness? What next steps do you need to take personally as a future-ready leader of change? A framework for implementing a 100-day sprint approach.

Complete Your Gen AI Exercise for Module 5. Challenge the underlying assumptions of your industry and the status quo; what should your organisation look like in 2030?

You can find out more about the course here - Building Future Readiness: Know Your Starting Point. Registration includes six months of free membership in our new Future Ready Hub & Leadership Community, launching in July 2024.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about the course or our new Hub & Community platform.

Dr Jim Hamill