Legacy Innovation Group - Strategic Futuring - Preemptively Owning and Shaping the Future

STRATEGIC FUTURING EXPLORED

Strategic Futuring — known also as Future Shaping — is about taking all of the foresights developed through formal Future Foresights work, and then acting on them.

More specifically, it is about using those foresights to explore a broad range of plausible future scenarios that could potentially play out, and then — using the powers and influences of the organization — pursuing very specific future strategies — aligned with very clear future visions — to push the future into the direction the organization desires for it to go — so that ultimately it can achieve its ideal and preferred future.

As can be appreciated from this explanation, Strategic Futuring inherently means being extremely proactive and preemptive in one's treatment of the future. Indeed, the world's most innovative organizations do not simply wait around to see what the future might bring them. No! Instead they are actively "out there" — working very, very hard to try to shape and drive the future to become precisely what they desire for it to be. This is why we call it shaping the future.

But our task here — as true market drivers — is not simply to shape our future, but rather to truly own our future — for the sake of our organization and its long term success.

In practice, Strategic Futuring work is divided into two (2) distinct and sequential stages — Visioning and Strategizing (also known as Strategy Formation).

THE PRACTICE OF VISIONING

The purpose of Visioning is to be able to cast a series of new visions for the organization to embrace and pursue — each around a specific Strategic Domain of significance to the organization.

To undertake Visioning, the organization will have Visionaries engage in a very specific set of tasks and activities aimed at so casting these new visions.

The new visions will then serve as the bases for a broad range of new strategies and strategic initiatives — defined by the organization's Strategists — that the organization is to pursue so that it can, in fact, realize these new visions.

To carry out the Visioning work, a very specific set of tools and practices are employed. These include the following:

The Futures Cone — A conceptual model illustrating how that as we move out in time, the range of possible futures that could occur grows increasingly broader, meaning that our level of confidence around any one given future occurring grows correspondingly lower.
Predict Next Year's Headlines — A creative visioning exercise in which a group of key leaders is brought together to conceive a series of idealized news headlines for the ensuing several years. These news headlines serve to project the organization into that near future, and therefore reflect very specific scenarios the organization wishes to see occur. Most importantly, it gives these leaders clear insights into what new innovations the organization may need to go about developing and delivering in order to so shape the future.
Long Range Forecasts — A creative visioning / writing exercise in which participants individually create speculative future scenarios of the world — including trends and societal propensities — and then share these new scenarios with the rest of the group. This lets the group develop a collective and shared understanding of the implications of each of those speculative future scenarios on both the organization and the new innovations it is considering, and to thereby make certain key decisions around those new innovations in order to ensure they're not anchored in an outmoded concept.
Future Storytelling — Having select individuals present well-crafted stories to certain key decision-makers in the organization regarding possible different future scenarios the organization could encounter, and then having those decision-makers contemplate and discuss these scenarios in order to develop a shared perspective around each one. This allows the decision-makers to better understand the nature and implications of each of the scenarios, so that they can then converge on an ideal future for the organization at various different points in the future.
Guided Future Visioning — The crafting and articulation of a new vision for an ideal and preferred future — one that fully reflects the organization's collective ideals, values, and beliefs, as well as its unified goals and aspirations. This allows a compelling new vision for the future to be established and disseminated — one that fully resonates with these ideals, values, beliefs, goals, and aspirations, and that consequently emboldens the organization to act on that vision for the sake of realizing this ideal and preferred future.

THE PRACTICE OF STRATEGIZING

The purpose of Strategizing is to develop impactful new innovation & growth strategies for the organization to pursue — each around a specific Strategic Domain of significance.

To undertake Strategizing, the organization will have Strategists engage in a very specific set of tasks and activities aimed at so crafting these new innovation & growth strategies.

As a part of this, and based on the visions previously cast in the Visioning stage, certain specific goals are now established, and beyond those certain specific strategies now defined — all of which ultimately culminate in a range of different strategic initiatives the organization will undertake so that it can in fact bring these new strategies to life and achieve the visions cast.

To carry out the Strategizing work, a very specific set of tools and practices are employed. These include the following:

Backcasting — A group brainstorming exercise in which participants first visualize together an ideal future state where the associated pains, frictions, and tensions have all been eliminated, as well as certain new gains created, and then write out a detailed storyline reflecting a day in the life of those benefiting from this ideal future state. Afterwards, by working backwards from this ideal future state, the group then explores and captures all of the details of new innovations that will get the situation from the current state to this new ideal state. This allows the group to define and articulate very specific innovation strategies for getting the situation from today's current state to tomorrow's ideal state, including all of the necessary assumptions, actions, and outcomes that must happen in order to achieve this new strategy.
Stress Testing — A strategy simulation exercise in which any number of competing future strategies are tested against any number of possible different future scenarios. This allows the organization to compare and contrast any number of different future strategy options against one another — so that ultimately they can uncover those that will be the most robust to the greatest possible number of different scenarios, and to thereafter formulate an actual new strategy that is fully informed and shaped by these new insights.
Future Strategy Cone — A conceptual model illustrating that in thinking about short-term / medium-term / long-term "strategies"', we must actually, in practice, work with: Tactics in the short-term, Strategies in the medium-term, Visions in the long-term, and Organizational Transformations in the extended long-term. This allows us to better understand how to think about the organization's future strategies — by showing us that as we move further and further out in time, our level of data and evidence grows increasingly thinner, and therefore our level of certainty grows commensurately lower. This tends to result in more well-thought-out new strategies for the future.
Strategy Decision Matrix — A 2x2 matrix in which we plot Certainty about certain trends against The Need for Actions vs. Insights for each particular trend. This forces the organization to take an appropriate type of action in each case — whether it be building new organizational capabilities, developing and refining new strategies, brainstorming new offerings, or seeking out new opportunities to deliver disruption in a given situation.
Long Range Strategic Planning — The undertaking of strategic planning work that is informed by extremely well-considered and well-analyzed possible and probable future scenarios. This inherently takes into account a far broader and much more diverse array of futures than does traditional short-term strategic planning, and consequently understands how that each of the plans and actions being developed must be capable of interacting with an extremely broad array of possible futures — including the exponential changes that many of them will represent.

THE OUTCOME OF STRATEGIC FUTURING

The outcome, and thus deliverable, of Strategic Futuring will be the development of a new future-focused innovation-driven Growth Strategy.

This new Strategy will prescribe the following items for the organization (to varying levels of detail, depending on the investment being made):

The organization's Growth Directions — this includes the Strategic Domains of focus, a clear Vision for each such Domain, and specific Goals for each Domain over each respective Strategic Horizon (short, medium, and long term).
A collection of well-defined Strategic Initiatives for each Strategic Domain / Strategic Horizon combination — including:

Certain very definitive initiatives (those having relatively foreseeable paths to success);
Certain experimental initiatives (those requiring much more experimentation, exploration, and learning); and
The space for any number of new bottom-up initiatives around new opportunities being identified by the organization's broader ecosystem of employees, partners, and so on.

This will all be formally documented for the organization as a final Future Growth Strategy Report.

THE ONLY TRUE BASIS FOR PROACTIVE GROWTH

Strategic Futuring – as described herein – is the only true basis for being able to craft and build out comprehensive new future-focused innovation-driven growth strategies that are fully capable of allowing an organization to proactively and preemptively shape its future in an intelligent and successful manner.

As such, Strategic Futuring creates the basis for not only definitive initiatives, but also for the key areas in which the organization must experiment and explore, so that ultimately it can "poke and prod" at the future and eventually discover the right paths toward future ownership.

All other approaches — including traditional linear strategic planning, with its gross over-reliance on assumption-based planning (usually erroneous assumptions) — simply cannot and will not permit an organization to experiment, learn, grow, and adapt in a way that positions it to truly lead the future. Only Strategic Futuring can do that.

Give us a call to learn more about our Strategic Futuring work.

THE ENGAGEMENT

The Strategic Futuring Engagement generally follows these steps:

We begin by listening to you so as to understand your current business situation and strategy, and from that understand how those may play into various emerging trends.
We also examine your organization's disposition toward risk and reward… more conservative or more progressive. This will impact how it embraces certain strategies.
We then undertake the actual Strategic Futuring work, using whichever methods and tools are most appropriate to the situation, and in many cases working very closely hand-in-hand with your organization. Along the way, we bring you in to consider the new visions, goals, and initiatives we're proposing for your organization – as they're being developed.
Finally, from this, we craft a comprehensive future-focused innovation-driven growth strategy.
When finished, we document this as a formal Future Growth Strategy Report.
We then travel to your office and present this new Future Growth Strategy to your organization's leadership. We can also lead workshops with any of your organization to help disseminate and activate the new Strategy wherever needed.
As needed, we can also assist you with additional follow–on work, such as Product Design or Brand Strategy.

OUR THINKING

VIEW ALL

STRATEGIC FUTURING

STRATEGIC FUTURING EXPLORED

THE PRACTICE OF VISIONING

THE PRACTICE OF STRATEGIZING

THE OUTCOME OF STRATEGIC FUTURING

THE ONLY TRUE BASIS FOR PROACTIVE GROWTH

THE ENGAGEMENT

Engage us for Strategic Futuring.

OUR THINKING

Four Traits Your Next CEO Must Have For Your Organization to Thrive

Let's Settle the Debate — Innovation Both Is & Is Not Everyone's Job

The Secret to High Energy Innovation Spaces

Change starts with a conversation