Cecilia Weckstrom

The future is not only complex, it’s outright unpredictable and if that had slipped our mind, recent events alone serve as a helpful reminder of just how quickly change can come -  and how widespread it can be in an increasingly interconnected world.

If we could predict the future, life would be easy. Although trend spotting and future foresighting have become a lucrative fields in their own right, I believe many of us still fail to grasp the opportunities that working with the future presents. I often see people spontaneously sort themselves into two camps – those who find the future far too woolly and prefer to only look at what is immediately in front or behind. Then there is the other group who love imagining what the future might hold, but struggle to trace their steps back to where we are today to chart the course how we might get to this imaginary future.

Therefore, when it comes to insights, you have to slice the view out of the window according to who is looking out the window with you. Insights have a tremendous potential in bringing people onto the same page and helping spark collective creative leaps into the future, to inspire innovation and of course the more diverse the group that embarks on this, the better the thinking will be. As Alan Kay so well captured it ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’.

But the crucial challenge actually remains with the trends. Traditional trend reports have a habit of sounding a little bit like weather forecasts, ’sunny, but cloudier later’ and many struggle with appropriating this kind of information into what they are doing on a day-to-day basis. Working with insights for innovation, this has been a particular bug-bear of mine for a while, therefore I wanted to change things around. Our head of Corporate Risk Management, Hans Laessoe, felt the same. To him the flipside of risk is opportunity and he’d much prefer to work with people identifying the most lucrative opportunities rather than purely reminding people where the biggest risks are.

So we decided to turn the whole process of trends and future forecasting on its head and couple it up with strategic scenario planning instead. Our thinking was that instead of looking at trends like a weather forecast, we wanted to develop a series of alternate, but entirely plausible, future scenarios and help people immerse themselves in these worlds in order to imagine what it would take to be successful in each alternate world and what are the steps required to get there. This was a gamble, it has to be said – because it depends on just how willing people are to engage in creative activity and in unleashing their imagination in pursuit of future visions. Fortunately for us, we are at a company with a product synonymous with creativity.

Our thinking was that if we could facilitate a collective exercise in strategic scenario planning, and take as many people on the journey with us – we could not only create better thinking than either one of us could produce ourselves and secondly, we would begin to create an openness and sensitivity about indicators for change, which means we can collectively keep track of this and not just Hans and myself on our own.

A successful organisation is one agile enough to respond and able to absorb and react to change, regardless where it comes from and therefore every part of the organisation needs to be able to be both a partner in identifying the change as well as responding to it.

And to get you in the mood of just how quickly the future is changing – watch this!