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  • TOM Merilahti
    TOM Merilahti    Group moderator
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    How will the future be different? What should we be doing about it?
    Integrated opportunity scanning and risk assessment processes for examining the future, strategy and change in organisations.

    By Dr. Michael Jackson – Chairman, Shaping Tomorrow ( to be posted by T.O.M. into the SICU Synergy forum)


    Will the world be the same as yesterday or different from today? Will it be different for all of us or just a few?


    Based on past experiences, most of us would guess the pace of change will continue to accelerate and be experienced by almost everyone on the planet.


    So, how will the future be different? Can we really know? And if we do know, what would, or should, we be doing about it?


    Two questions to hold in your head and to think about from both the perspectives of your leisure and working life. Two questions from Prahalad and Hamel’s 1994 book ‘Competing for the Future’ that can help us better inform ourselves of what’s coming and how to respond.


    Change is constant. We only have to look at the last 250 years to see that cycles of change that fundamentally alter human lifestyles occur every forty years or so.


    • 1771 – Industrial Revolution

    • 1829 – Steam and railways

    • 1875 – Steel, electricity, heavy engineering

    • 1908 – Oil, automobiles, mass production

    • 1948 – Computing, telephone, television

    • 1971 – Information and communication technologies


    And we know that new technologies feed the development of even more technologies, further, spawning more change at an ever accelerating rate.


    Accelerating change brings the paradox of increased understanding and increased complexity. Just look at the influence of ubiquitous computing to see this dichotomy in action, or nearer to home, the increasing complexity of auditing, risk management and risk assessment.


    Those of us born just after WWII in Europe grew up with lino, larders, washboards (we even learned how to play these as musical instruments), coal fires as the only means of heating, holidays on the nearest coastline, ration cards and the forerunner of the computer chip—the electronic valve!


    Things were relatively predictable then. Dad did a 9 to 5 job and stayed with his employer for life. Mum served a different dish each day of the week, but the same dish on the same day each week. We were grateful for a once-a-week packet of sweets and people amused themselves with parlour games, the family piano and local activities.


    And since then, in just sixty years, we have replaced lino with carpeting, larders with fridges, and parlour games with television. Telephones are now part of how we live moment to moment in the advanced world, and computer chips are all around us.


    We have liberated ourselves from local living—we drive our own cars and travel the world—and relieved ourselves of most of the day-to-day drudgery of maintaining a household.


    We have solved some problems and created others in our liberated world.


    The potential for an upcoming energy crisis threatens us all. Increasing security concerns give rise to worrying solutions and new privacy issues. The state of the environment and climate change give rise to fears that we are creating the conditions for major droughts, storms and other severe weather phenomena.


    As the pace of change accelerates and the world becomes a more complex and smaller place to live and work, the ability of organisations to better anticipate the future becomes increasingly important.


    Businesses, with a few exceptions, are facing swirling change on every front. Planning cycles are getting shorter, hierarchies are being dismantled, product shelf-lives are measured in days not years and new methods of distribution replace traditional delivery mechanisms. Lean thinking, more choice, higher value added is the mantra of new competitors who invade every industry, create new ones or shake up the competition from within.


    The one-size-fits-all product of the past is giving way to bewildering choices. Once, you could only ‘Have a break’ with one type of Kit Kat. Then Kit Kat added a tasty and attractively packaged variant and the whole confectionery industry soon followed suit. Each product now offers different colours, flavours, additives, wrappers, shapes and sizes. Today, no one in the confectionery industry has a break; it’s a relentless, grinding, daily competition that requires spotting the next innovation ahead of one’s rivals and avoiding the risk of sudden failure.


    Kit Kat is typical of the new innovations being introduced by businesses everywhere; bigger, smaller, broader, thinner, faster, slower, more, less, further, nearer, new, old, cheaper, expensive and so on in an effort to differentiate. Naturally, their competitors have followed with the result that the confectionery market has changed beyond all recognition from where it was just a few years ago.


    The challenge for senior business people means keeping up with thousands of trends, recognising the many driving forces for change coming from outside their industry, and coping with the occasional wild-card that only the very few have been lucky enough to take advantage of.


    Alternative energies, green business, healthy living, intelligent networks, smart computing, tele-working and robotics among many others beckon, but identifying the solid paths to tread and hidden swamps to avoid are challenges that should tax all business leaders.


    Coupled with external change, businesses are expected to cope with adapting to the new realities with a plethora of initiatives on offer. Organisations are looking to:


    · new alliances,

    · joining networks (even among their competitors),

    · hiring contractors with special skills to quickly solve problems before moving on,

    · off-shoring,

    · outsourcing and

    · learning how to turn on a dime


    No wonder many businesses just muddle along trying to keep costs and risks down, exhorting the workforce for higher production and reacting to, rather than leading their industries. But now, if you aren’t in the leading pack, you’re losing big time.


    So how can an organisation be more nimble while at the same time charting a preferable path to its future and stay roughly on course? What can a business do to determine how the future will be different and, if it knew what it should do about it? Clever businesses and some governments have been finding the answers by looking much further ahead than the next quarter or financial year.


    Until recently, only the most major of corporations could afford to engage their own internal foresight teams or pay the high fees of professional researchers for one-off Horizon Scanning research. Their motivations to do so appear grounded in a combination of the following drivers:


    Their products and services inherently demand very long-term planning
    They seek to cope with uncertainties in the environment in general
    They are looking to innovate faster than ever before
    They look to identify and track emerging patterns of change far faster than their competitors
    They explore the space of possibilities such changes create to transform their offers
    But costs of trends research are falling thanks to an increasing number of Web based foresight services. Companies rely on others to find the trends, forces for change and wildcards while they concentrate on analysing the potential impacts on their organisation. Yet, these services still tend to be the domain of company marketers and strategists. The leading organisations however, have made foresight part of their culture; they expect auditors and risk managers to be equal partners in discovering what will be important tomorrow.


    But in a recent survey carried out by the Institute of Directors in the UK with Loughborough University, they discovered that senior business people rated other organisations in general as poor future thinkers, yet rated their own business and the need to anticipate the future very highly. These same respondents also demonstrated their organisations real lack of inherent future thinking and processes by admitting that they rarely if ever used the tools and methods employed by the leading Horizon Scanning businesses.


    The study seemed to confirm that most businesses are stuck with today’s paradigms, adopting old and me-too approaches, working with poor intelligence and taking a short term approach. This will surely mark the death knell of many in this study, but there are a few who do look over the horizon for innovation and inspiration. So where are they looking?


    Many organisations are looking to the plethora of new competitive intelligence companies like mirrormirror.inc, a fashion trends researcher; coolbusiness ideas.com and trendwatching.com all of whom use trend scouts to bring latest fads and ideas from around the world to their customers.


    Clearly, someone somewhere is working on all our futures whether it is in transportation, health, security, environment, technology or some other area. The trend scouts try to answer the nearer term intelligence questions.


    Some businesses have more recently learnt how to use their staff, suppliers, customers, non-customers and even their dissidents to be their regular trend scouts, building robust information gathering systems to sift, sort and prioritise intelligence into coherent learning and subsequent action. It works on the assumptions that we all know something, all have ideas, and that as individuals we are blind but collectively we can see. This combined ‘Wisdom of Crowds’* is helping to keep these organisations fresh and their people alert to the next opportunities and risks without needing traditional five year plans that gather dust on shelves.


    Some leading Horizon Scanning organisations are also building longer term, dynamic trends databases covering hundreds, even thousands, of potential blind-spots. These blind-spots are offered to their client organisations to stay constantly on top of tomorrow. The leading organisations are known to be integrating future methods, strategic planning models and change management tools to their offering; a soup to nuts electronic and customised solution for business’ wanting to get to the future at rocket speed and stay there.


    Burt Nanus describes the role of a leader as involving anticipation, change, creativity, initiative, organisation, standards and teamwork. Leaders have never needed these skills more. Organisations will have to accept increasing complexity but find new ways to manage it.


    The new competitive intelligence companies and leading environmental scanners are well placed to deliver much of what they need with fresh integrated processes for examining the future, strategy and change in organisations.


    Is your organisation fresh? Do you know where the next forces for change are coming from? If not, you surely should start exploring what’s coming now and reduce the possibility of potential failure in your life. And who knows, you might just ‘Have a break’ as Kit Kat did and steal a march in your marketplace.


    Dr. Mike Jackson - Chairman of Shaping Tomorrow.

    Shaping Tomorrow (http://www.shapingtomorrow.com) exists to help people and organisations better ‘anticipate the future’ and recognize the opportunities and trends that will affect them. As environmental scanning and trends researchers they help businesses manage uncertainty and create opportunities for growth and profits - today.

    * From the title of the book ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ by James Surowiecki

    http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/

    ** From Competing for the Future - Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad Harvard Business
    School Press; Reprint edition (April 1, 1996) ISBN: 0875847161
    • 17 Mar 2006, 6:42 pm