FUTURE SCENARIO FORECASTING

The Most Dangerous Futures are Those You Don’t See Coming

It isn’t the inability to predict the future that gets you in trouble—it's the things you assume will just happen, but don’t; or when alternative futures you’ve never considered start to play a dominant role. Problems arise when you are caught off guard. The key is to expand your vantage point and broaden your expectations.

Future Scenario Forecasting is a process that helps you anticipate and prepare for change. By examining and testing different possible outcomes—potential threats, emerging ideas, exciting opportunities—organizations can build their collective capability to deal with whatever future unfolds.

Every organization uses some set of beliefs about the future whenever it makes a business or design decision. These assumptions are often implicit and unarticulated—concealed from everyday conversations because they’re largely considered “obvious knowledge” about how customers, competitors and employees will act moving forward.

Strengthen Your Ability to Foresee, Prepare For and Confront Marketplace Shifts

Scenarios enable you to explore multiple future possibilities based on a focus question that is critical to your business goals. The emphasis isn’t on what will happen, but on what could happen, given various observed drivers.

Our unique approach to Future Scenario Forecasting integrates futures-thinking into existing internal research and innovation initiatives—making the process immersive, experiential and grounded in qualitative customer insight.

Future Scenario Forecasting establishes a foundation for organizations to:

1. Evaluate go-to-market strategies based on future, rather than just current customer needs
2. Point out bias, blind spots and critical trends to consider during the strategy formation process
3. Develop a futures-oriented framework to prioritize innovation portfolio investments
4. Generate future-oriented innovation concepts based on each specific scenario
5. Uncover ideal experiences for customers/employees across various future scenarios
6. Evaluate current and in-development offerings against future needs to identify opportunities and gaps