Prototyping the Future

"How is the future?"

Hope: it is anticipating something good to come in the future. You do not expect what you already have, although you can expect it to continue or end.

We have Hope to believe and create the best or the best we can. It is even an act of conscious affirmation.

The human tendency to hope is a consequence of the evolution of the brain.

And it is the source of the opportunities to come. It encourages us to continue and puts wings at our feet. Without it, we are unable to take action from anything.

We use our knowledge and ability to imagine the Future; catalyze new actions to realize our most profound hopes and help us create the world we want.

But Hope includes the word "problem." We face each day and hope to be able to solve every one of the problems that life puts in front of us, and we do it with Hope "

Then how we build a future; or how could we even prototype the Future with something of Hope? from our conception? 

Conception understood from a set of feasible perspectives. And that makes a perfect match with the Creativity that we must apply every day to face the daily problem-solving.

When faced with a perverse problem, no solution lasts forever. As our knowledge expands, as new stakeholders emerge, and as mentalities change, the structure of the issues will also change, and the relevant scenarios should be modified.

At some point, it will be necessary to re-examine the problem, using the previous process. This may include the review and identification of new actions.

Strategic forecasting and exponential thinking should be an integral part of the planning or prototyping process. Compatibles with the thought process; that raises an end-to-end process without errors; but in reality, we all know it is easier to make mistakes than to have successes, we could obtain additional information from our failures and dispose in such a way that they facilitate the scope of the solution, in the best way possible, with the least temporary, personal cost and material, and the maximum benefit, instead of adopting a predetermined problem-solving approach.

In other words; instead of trying to offer solutions to the challenges as they are currently manifested, exponential thinking encourages decision-makers to explore the possible nature of the difficulty in the Future.

Exponential thinking is a way to create solutions through technology that positively impact millions of people, through a change of mentality, skills, networks, and ecosystems.

Salim Ismail, the author of the book Exponential Organizations and director of Singularity University, explains:

The benefit of the process is that it can allow the participants and stakeholders involved in a decision to get involved and deal with the complexity and uncertainty of the environment in which they operate.

The essential advantage creates an explicit step and, generally, that it is overlooked in the strategic planning process where the assumptions of decision-makers about the Future can be questioned; this is about Strategic Foresight.

Strategic foresight can help enable decisions in two different but complementary ways: build resilience and create a positive vision of the Future to move forward.

As human beings, we jump to conclusions about the shape of the Future. We rely on memory, a common-sense approach to solving problems based on past experiences, to make quick decisions. In the face of overwhelming uncertainty(stay paralyzed or run), these encourage us mainly to take the approach of the status quo: that tomorrow will be like today. (Only to confirm old personal beliefs, and why not: have the pleasure of telling us, in the end, I told you: nothing changes).

This status quo bias is often incorporated and not questioned within organizations, professional groups, and other communities.

We are troubled by uncertainty and change, and we feel pressured to converge. Behavioral economics speaks of "being anchored" or of "investing" in a position, and this occurs both organizationally and individually. We have mental maps of our world of ideas and thinking that we use for decision making and an inherent tendency to favor corroborative data and ignore challenging data.

The Infinite Game written by Simon Sinek; he knows how difficult it is for all of us to take the long-term vision as a mentality error. He helps us comparing activities that have finite rules, such as chess, with those that continuously present new challenges, such as business. In "infinite games," looking for a just cause is the only way to overcome existential crises, adapt and prosper in the Future.

Sinek urges leaders to think less about the endings and more about the new opportunities. Strive to build a relationship with the customer instead of closing a sale.

To start prototyping the Future; I took this 6 Steps from Simon Sinek :

1- Digitalization: It means to translate a traditional model into a digital model. How to use technology to reach millions of people? What can I digitize of my business, product, or service?

2- Deception: This is the "frustrating" step of exponential transaction because at first, the results are slower than in traditional businesses, but it is time to stay calm and not throw the towel.

3- Disruption: It is about breaking the rules of the established. When we talk about disruption, many companies prefer to maintain the conditions that have ensured success in the past. In the exponential growth phase, the key is to move quickly to the digital model that allows sustainability over time.

4- Dematerialization: The digitization level of the product/service reaches the point where it dematerializes.

 5- Demonetization: This step is the constant reduction of costs due to the improvement of the technology and the decline of the material costs, of course, without reducing the quality, even improving it. The exponential prototypes lead to a reduction of the expenses, which makes the product/service more accessible, and therefore has higher demand, with equal or better quality.

6- Democratization: is the way of expressing that, thanks to all the previous steps, people have equal access to use products/services that were previously restricted to certain people.

Ready to prototype the Future?

Carolina Salazar

CInO Design Thinking Sweden

[email protected]