Case Study: How to Review Your Strategy with Foresight.
Summary.
The company implemented a foresight process to review its strategy, including a STEEP analysis, survey of the executive and leadership team, foresight workshops, and the creation of design fiction narratives.
This allowed them to consider external factors that could affect the business in its futures and opened up new points of view, insights, and conversations.
In response to the question "If the world around us is changing, how do we need to change?" they generated a defined set of emerging change priorities to track over time, potential new products/programs for the innovation pipeline, potential new business areas from existing capabilities, and a list of new capabilities aimed at helping them adapt to change.
Situation.
The company has an existing strategy with a 40% total revenue growth target due in three years. Current growth has been driven by mergers and acquisitions however the opportunity and appetite for this to continue was low. Organic growth through new business was price driven with the company submitting a high volume of bids and tenders in highly competitive markets. The result was more work at lower and lower margins. The company had stretched its capabilities far beyond its core areas of competency and was struggling to deliver on its objectives. Increasingly the company was seeing rapid changes in industries, customers and markets which were difficult to predict and prepare for. On the current path margin squeeze would accelerate and revenue growth targets would become increasingly difficult to achieve whilst reducing expenditure at the same time. The executive team wanted to review the current strategy to spark new thinking that could identify adjacent markets, new business opportunities and deliver greater competitive advantage. They wanted to answer the question;
"If the world around us is changing, how do we need to change?"
Solution.
The company implemented a foresight process to review its strategy. This was done in five stages:
STEEP analysis: This was used to identify external factors that may affect the business in its futures. These included societal, technological, economic, environmental and political emerging change and trends identified using the Futures Platform™ database.
Executive and leadership team survey: Using a foresight radar and collaboration tools the team explored and assessed approx. 40 emerging change and trend data points. These were rated for alignment with existing capabilities and strategy.
Foresight workshops: A series of workshops were undertaken to test the survey results in more depth and add additional information. These involved a mixture of facilitated discussion, brainstorming and group exercises.
Scenario parameters: The survey and workshops data was consolidated and visualised to create a series of change drivers which were used to create scenario parameters.
Design fiction narratives: The scenario parameters were then used to create a set of detailed future scenarios. This included a design fiction workshop with the strategy team to kick-start story maps and character personas. The scenarios were used to stress test the current strategy and identify areas of strategic opportunity.
Outcomes.
The foresight process initiated by the company allowed its executive and leadership teams to take a step back and consider a range of potential future scenarios, built using academic grade trend data, that could impact their business. The survey engaged a wide range of people from all parts of the company, many of whom would not normally get to be directly involved in a strategy review. This immediately opened up new points of view, insights and cross-functional conversations. Attendance rates and active engagement in the workshops were very high as people embraced the opportunity to provide ideas and suggestions. The data generated gave the company strategy team access to new insights and expanded their understanding of how the business could develop. The detailed design fiction stories created a framework to assess opportunities and design possible solutions in ways that had not been possible before.
In response to the focal question "If the world around us is changing, how do we need to change?" the solution generated:
A defined set of emerging change and trend priorities to track over time.
A list of new product/program concepts that could be fed into the company's innovation pipeline.
A set of new business areas with potential to be built from the company's established capabilities.
A list of new capabilities that could help the company adapt to change.
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.
