Day 05. Activating Corporate Futures
Futures & Foresight: Putting “Long-term” Back in Strategic Planning
Friday June 26, 12:45pm EDT
⚡ Lightning Talk, 15 minute session
Over the last twenty years, strategic planning horizons have been getting shorter as the technology-fueled pace of change gets faster and faster. Generally, this is because of the view that, “too much will change in five years, so we’ll create a three-year strategy.” However, this approach assumes that a strategic plan should be based on a forecast of a single, predicted future. We believe there’s a better way: foresight and alternate futures. While organizations do need reliable short-term forecasts, the long-term future can still be part of strategic planning, it just needs one change: the willingness to explore and prepare for multiple futures. In this presentation, one approach for examining multiple futures will be discussed. The topics covered will include the process of scanning the environment to identify drivers of change, defining the alternate futures, creating the vivid particulars that make the alternate worlds come to life, and how to link the future worlds to today’s strategic decisions. The discussion will also cover how speculative design has an ideal role in helping communicate the vivid particulars of future worlds to help planners better understand those worlds and the impact and implications to their organizations.
Some examples will be provided along with a discussion of the opportunity to embed speculative design in mainstream strategic planning processes. The goals of this session are:
Create an understanding of the relationship between strategic planning and futurism
Learn a framework for creating multiple, alternate futures to support strategic planning
Highlight the opportunity of speculative design in the strategic planning process Our futurist approach is not focused on predicting a single future but on preparing for multiple futures.
We believe imagining a range of futures, and determining what success looks like in each of them, allows organizations to both better influence and better prepare for what may happen in a messy, uncertain world. This approach has been in use by Toffler Associates for over 25 years and is based on the approaches our founder, Alvin Toffler, used to analyze, understand, and imagine the future we’re now living.
Dan Fukushima
Designer / Futurist, Toffler Associates
Dan Fukushima has been helping organizations identify, plan for, and capitalize on growth opportunities for over 30 years. He now applies Toffler concepts and futures approaches to long-term strategy formulation and preparation for disruption. He has been fortunate to have had an insider's perspective of industry disruption while working in the travel, telecommunications, retail, and consumer products industries. That experience has provided him insights into opportunity identification, threat recognition, and strategic response patterns that help organizations adapt to and thrive in new environments. Dan spent the first decade of his career working in the airline industry. In over 20 years of consulting, Dan has concentrated on the customer-facing and growth sides of organizations specializing in market and consumer analysis, strategic planning, product/service innovation, and business model design.