Today’s insights are brought to you by my colleague and global futurist, Graeme Codrington.
I want to highlight a brilliant Harvard Business Review article published just two weeks ago by fellow futurist, Prof. Amy Webb.
Read it on the HBR website (you may need to provide an email address to access it, but it is a free article to read).
Amy is at the forefront of something our team also advocates for: improving strategic foresight in organisations, and ensuring it is used by everyone and every level of our businesses. Strategic foresight is “a disciplined and systematic approach to identify where to play, how to win in the future, and how to ensure organisational resiliency in the face of unforeseen disruption.”
We called our company ’TomorrowToday’ for this very reason: we need to spend some of our time thinking about how the world of tomorrow will be different, and the disruptive forces that will make it so; and then we must spend the rest of our time in the world of today, developing antifragile resilience and adaptability, and embedding a future-focused toolkit into your organisational DNA.
The world is moving too fast and too unpredictably to leave all of this to annual getaways attended only by senior leaders.
In the article, Amy says: “Which is better? The ability to see the future, or the ability to create and execute the right strategy? There is a clear answer: [both]. Strategy and foresight were once the same discipline. And they should be again.” We couldn’t agree more.
Amy documents how and why these two vital tools were disconnected, why they both need to be updated, and then concludes the article outlining the ten-step process she teaches on her NYU Stern Business School course on Strategic Foresight. We don’t have much to add to this excellent article – so please read it.
What we do want to highlight, is that you can teach your people the tools and skills required to ’think like a futurist’. We’ll be publishing a book on this very topic in a few months, but if you’ve followed our work for any length of time, you’ll know that we are passionate about sharing these tools and making them easy for everyone to use. They don’t require a lot of time, nor a massive budget, but rather they just need consistency and a conscious decision to allocate some of your attention to thinking about tomorrow’s world today.
If you’d like more information about our Futurist’s Toolkit, the presentations, workshops and resources we have available to help you build strategic foresight and imagination into your people and teams, please just contact us and set up an obligation-free chat with one of our team.
The future is coming faster than you think and deserves a bit of your attention right now. Be in touch.
Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognised futurist, specialising in the future of work. He helps organisations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.