How to Plan for a Volatile Future
As change becomes more rapid and volatile, having an outdated business model is detrimental and preparing your business for the future is paramount.
A recent McKinsey article about the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on businesses states: “Companies with resilient, future-ready business models positioned to ride these trends have pulled further away from their industry peers, while those with legacy business models have, for the most part, fallen further behind.” As change becomes more rapid and volatile, having an outdated business model is detrimental and preparing your business for the future is paramount. Here are a few ways that your business can begin planning for the future.
Identify Trends. The future may seem unpredictable and planning for the future can seem like a vain effort. But the future is not entirely unreasonable. That same McKinsey article points out that, during the COVID-19 crisis, we are not seeing a sudden emergence of new trends, but rather a great acceleration of trends that existed before the crisis. Online delivery and remote working softwares were both growing areas that saw rapid acceleration during the crisis. It is possible to make sense of the future. You just have to equip yourself with the right tools to do so.
Don’t forget about people. One mistake analysts, researchers, and futurists make is forgetting about the human factor. As a recent article from the Future’s School says, “the world is much more complex than numbers and machines. It includes new ideas, converging events, meshing patterns, multiple alternatives, design, imaginations, creativity, nascent concepts, stories, assumptions and biases, shifting values and emerging issues.” The human factor is often the most important and most overlooked factor to take into account when planning for the future.
Use Strategic Foresight. An emerging discipline called “Strategic Foresight” is an organizational discipline that equips leaders to guide their organizations through uncertainty. When practicing Strategic Foresight, businesses proactively monitor patterns of change in their industry, strategize potential responses to those patterns and develop a series of future-thinking views, business opportunities and courses of action for decisions makers.
Bridge Innovate invested two years of research scanning for the best tools and resources to support leaders in identifying and planning for disruptive trends to develop Foresight Scouts®, an online cohort program that learns the fundamentals of strategic foresight by doing strategic foresight. Join us!
Foresight Scouts® helps leaders understand how to prevail in volatile markets by anticipating and imagining new business models that are in line with an era of disruptive economies and changing consumer patterns. Companies such as IBM, Disney, Ford and Shell use strategic foresight. Research shows that future-prepared firms outperform the average by a 33% higher profitability and 200% higher growth.
To learn more about and register for this upcoming program, click above. To contact the program director, email mkim@bridgeinnovate.com. Or, schedule a meeting.