As designers and foresight practitioners, we're pretty good at storytelling utopias, ideal experiences, provocative future products, and other end states. However, our partner teams rarely know how to take these ideas from philosophical discussion into productive next steps—especially when our R&D cycles have long tails into "value" metrics that would give us permission to create any of our ideas. How do we answer, "What now?" How do we design interim products that lay foundation for a grander vision? Or, even more aspirational, how do we steer the actions of multiple teams and industries toward a unified, democratized vision…aligning today's competitors into tomorrow's business partners? how do we utilize our role from the inside, to realize real, tangible, and positive change on the outside?

In this workshop, I'll share our Future of Freight Vision Timeline—how it was created, the value it provides in design discovery, and how we maintain it recursively. Our activities will use the tool and its associated worksheets to identify long-horizon product opportunities and speculative business models, describe those who will be both positively and negatively impacted by our offering, set a strategic roadmap into this vision including dependencies (cultural, financial, technological, etc.), and finally to identify near-term, actionable, partner-specific product opportunities. This talk is tailored to the designer, product strategist, or any other contributor within a large, reluctant organization or industry, who (like me) struggles to operationalize speculative futures and make a tangible difference that results in positive change.