How to Make Your Strategy Truly Future-Focussed

Strategy is all about the future, but in my experience the future is treated very simplistically in strategy development.

Most organisations treat “future” as a period of time that is an extrapolation of the last period of time (known as “the recent past”). The difficulty of this thinking is that the future is almost certainly going to be different, possibly very very different. Linear thinking means that organisations fail to consider other possibilities, especially possibilities that are exponential or step changes from the current reality. Also, strategy based on a single view of the future runs the risk of leading an organisation down an irrelevant direction.

The way to avoid these problems is to use foresight, also known as futures thinking. A core idea of foresight is that we can think about the future as a range of possibilities. We don’t know which is going to be closest to reality, but if we consider a variety of possibilities then our strategic thinking and strategy execution are going to be better able to adapt to whatever the future holds.

Just to be clear, foresight is not prediction. There are no crystal balls or tea leaves or pointy hats.  Foresight is about creating reasonable scenarios that represent possibilities of what the future might become. 

I have worked with futurists (the practitioners of foresight) on a number of strategy projects. Here are a few observations that I have from applying foresight ideas to strategy.

Stories: Science Fiction, not Fantasy

People find foresight engaging because it is about stories. These are not just any kind of stories though – they have to have a nugget of plausibility, a grain of reality. Think of science fiction. Great science fiction is built on something that we know about now, and taking the idea further than current reality. The same applies for scenarios of the future.

Scenarios that are described as stories bring to life the factors that influence strategy. Conversations amongst a leadership team or board are much more animated when talking about the implications of a story on an organisation, than reviewing a typical strategy table or graph.

Assumptions

We all make assumptions about the world around us. There is nothing wrong with this – it is human nature and we have to so that we do not become overwhelmed with detail. However, we often forget our assumptions or believe that our assumptions are the eternal truth.

Foresight seeks to make assumptions explicit.  If we know what our assumptions are, then we can look at ways that assumptions might not actually be true. These may be risks, or better yet, opportunities.

Pausing to Think

Some strategy projects that I have been involved in have been about capturing what is already in people’s minds in order to populate a strategy framework. In contrast, foresight techniques challenge people’s thinking by posing thought-provoking questions about the desired future and alternative futures. Even in highly operational organisations, leadership teams find it valuable to pause and think about the foundations of the strategy.

Foresight and Strategy Execution

Foresight tools help to make strategy execution more robust. In particular, scenarios provide a way of testing strategy execution, for example:

• What are the unstated assumptions in the strategy map?
• What KPIs should be monitored to know if scenarios are actually happening (in other words, how would we know if the real future is becoming significantly different from the assumed future)?
• Would the strategic objectives still be relevant if the future were different?
• How could strategy execution be made more nimble to adapt to rapid shifts in the organisation’s environment?

When to Apply Foresight in Strategy

A futurist would naturally say “always”!

I recommend applying foresight when an organisation wants to expand the up-front thinking of strategy development beyond the traditional tools like SWOT and PESTEL. There are some quite simple tools that raise critical questions about the future, and there are comprehensive generative and analytical techniques such as those for developing and analysing scenarios of the future.

Foresight can also be used to stress-test an existing strategy to see how well it might work if the underlying assumptions about the future change.

   If you would like to know more about using foresight in strategy development, contact me at [email protected]