One of the most common workshop ice breakers asks you to tell your fellow participants something unexpected or quirky that they are not likely to know about you. I can still remember the shock and amusement when I confessed to my fellow Axis board members that I was a ‘Trekkie’ (for the uninitiated a fan of the Star Trek TV programmes and films) and I had even made myself a costume. This was before Patrick Stewart and Cosplay made such interests respectable!
I love science/speculative fiction and immersing myself in the alternative worlds and futures that authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold and Nancy Kress imagine into being.
Right now, all of those charged with planning for, and with, their organisations are having to turn their attention to what their own future worlds might look like and therefore how they can/should respond. Not as exotic as imagining intelligent gas clouds in Jupiter or faster than light travel, but rather more urgent so we would like to offer a few tips to those thinking about their possible futures.
Three guidelines for thinking about alternative futures for your organisation:
- Use your imagination. This is a creative process so bring some of the energy and ways of thinking you would normally use when thinking about staging a new show or mounting a new exhibition
- Who you are thinking with? To think differently it really helps to have a diverse set of voices and some new perspectives. Original thinking is hard if you just work with the same group of people you have known for a number of years.
- Have a process. This stuff is hard, having a process to follow makes it easier, faster and more productive.
Here are three possible processes to aid your future thinking:
Brainstorming.
Brainstorming is a process not a free for all or a chat. For it to work you need to prepare. Bring a suitably diverse and appropriately sized group together. Agree the question(s) you are going to brainstorm: think about open questions that begin with ‘In what ways might we … or How could we …..?’. Follow the rules for brainstorming – see this excellent summary from IDEO. When you have generated lots of ideas select the ones you want to work on.
Scenario planning
One thing we all know about the future is that we cannot predict it; if we could there would be no gambling industry and the world’s financial markets would be mostly redundant. Scenario planning is one way of thinking about the future that acknowledges the impossibility of accurate prediction upfront by saying that we need to explore what possible/likely futures there are and then work out how to get ready for what we can’t control.
A quick way of doing this is to think of a few big drivers of change in your external environment. For example
- How will our economy respond after the lockdown is lifted: bounce back quickly or prolonged recession?
- How will the lockdown have affected our customers? Will they return to their previous habits or will their behaviours have been changed?
Choose two and map them on a 2 x 2 matrix so you have four scenarios.
Think about what each scenario might look like. Then consider how your organisation could best respond to this scenario. Look at the ideas you have developed: what are the common themes, where are the major differences that you will have to choose between?
‘Here is one I prepared earlier’ – use a checklist
There are really only a limited number of options for future action. Use a checklist such as this one to kick off your thinking.
However, you choose to do your future thinking, we wish you well. And do share any approaches or ideas that have worked for you.
Susan and Dawn