Case Study: How to Build Scenarios to Expand Thinking.
Summary.
The company was experiencing difficulty in recruiting suitably qualified staff and plan technology investments in a fast changing world.
In response, the company commissioned a foresight project to expand leadership team awareness of potential issues and stimulate thinking.
This included four stages: identifying emerging change and trends, conducting a leadership team survey, creating scenario narratives, and presenting a final report.
Outcomes included broadened perspectives, enhanced strategic thinking, collective optimism benchmarking, and better understanding of people-technology combinations for the future.
Results were used to support deeper strategic conversations at the leadership level and shared with broader staff for further exploration and ideation.
Situation.
What if your business growth was limited by your ability to employ suitably qualified staff?
What if recent technology developments such as automation and AI were signalling that many of your services could be replaced by technology?
How would you plan for a range of disruptive, uncertain, but plausible, futures?
The company delivers technical services to an established and stable market. Demand is consistent and with a strengthening brand profile, the company is positioned for continued growth. Recruiting and retaining suitably qualified staff is the biggest barrier to growth. Recent technology developments in automation and artificial intelligence are seen as having strong potential to replace many of the processes and support staff, as well as to automate some of the core services. Technology is also starting to reduce the barriers to entry for competitors that built technology systems to deliver high-quality services at lower prices and faster speed.
The company wanted to answer the question;
"What could the futures of people and technology look like in our industry, and what could this mean for our business?"
Solution.
The company commissioned a foresight project to expand the awareness of the issues and stimulate thinking within its leadership team. This was done in four stages:
Emerging change and trends: Using the Futures Platform™ database, and in collaboration with the Managing Director, 20 emerging change and trend data points were identified for exploration.
Leadership team survey: Using a foresight radar the team explored and assessed approx. 20 emerging change and trend data points. These were rated for the probability of occurrence and impact on business activities. The team also measured their collective optimism using the Revised Life Orientation Test LOT-R*.
Scenario narratives: The survey data was compiled and transformed into a series of change drivers, which served as the foundation for crafting four detailed scenarios.
Report presentation: All outputs and the processes used were presented to the leadership team for discussion and reflection.
Outcomes.
The foresight process delivered a range of significant outcomes, leading to broadened perspectives and enhanced strategic thinking. The leadership team gained a better understanding of how various change combinations of people and technology could develop over time. This disrupted some of the established thinking and generated many discussions around the implications for the business.
The Futures Platform™ foresight radar provided a novel platform to visualise and explore the emerging change and trends data that the leadership team found easy and engaging. It supported quick and efficient exploration of a range of new data. Using the results from Revised Life Orientation Test LOT-R* gave the team a benchmark for its collective optimism that positioned their futures thinking as hopeful and confident.
The detailed scenarios provided a safe space to explore, validate and challenge different points of view. As highly qualified technical specialists the leadership team appreciated the quantitative and qualitative methodologies used to build the Futures Platform™ emerging change and trend data points. This provided credible validation to the more creative scenario narratives that explored imaginary, but plausible, ideas. All team members, irrespective of their existing view of what futures may appear, were able to accept that even the more expansive or challenging scenario ideas were at least plausible based on the data.
The outputs have been used to inform strategic conversations at the leadership levels and also shared with a broader set of staff to support strategic exploration and ideation. Emerging change and trend data points assessed as high impact have been noted for continued review and reflection at leadership team meetings. A deeper foresight project has been earmarked for their next full review of the strategy.
*Revised Life Orientation Test LOT-R. Reference: Scheier, M. F., Carver, C. S., & Bridges, M. W. (1994) A reevaluation of the Life Orientation Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1063–1078
Case studies are not intended to represent or guarantee that current or future customers or clients can achieve the same or similar results; rather, they represent what is possible for illustrative purposes only.
