WHAT + HOW
The future is made with you, without you or against you. — Michel Godet
OUR FUTURES WORK (FW)
THE WHAT ?
Learning the Future, Derisking the Future
In this world of rapid, disruptive and complex changes, it has become imperative to understand how the future is made, how to approach it in order to see beyond forecasts, identify risks, opportunities and required resources and ultimately how you can influence it. This knowledge and skill will help you develop strategies that take into account new possibilities for action that allow you to prosper and grow in uncertainty, and this, on all horizons. Finally, learning about the future allows us to improve our focus on the present by freeing ourselves from the uncertainty of the future created by this lack of learning.
THE HOW ?
The Work
The how for us is The Work to be done, and one of the objectives of The Work is to reduce, or even eliminate, an organization’s information asymmetry regarding its future horizon and, in doing so, the effects of this asymmetry on other horizons. Our job is to offer learning opportunities with simple and relevant content. Much like we learn and practice law, we move from the general to the specific.
FULL HORIZONS
FULL HORIZONS* is our proprietary way to map and organize an organization’s information around its activities, assets etc. on the 3 Horizons (McKinsey, Sharpe). It is also a mindmap and a matrix to connect the dots within and between each horizons.
* A word on the short term
The speed of change requires a lot of attention and puts a lot of pressure on founders and/or management to make adjustments, which creates a strong sense of urgency and a rather short-term vision. Our main objective is to provide a good view of the short, medium and long term through the 3 horizons model so that organizations can better understand and act according to the specificities and priorities of each.
FUTURE HORIZON
Build your futures work capacity and functions, prospect futures, analyze them, create scenarios, and study impacts, all in order to reach the point where a preferred future emerges. Finally, practice vigilance.
HORIZONS: RISKS
Identify traditional and new types or classes of risks across and within each horizon. The program also includes an exploration of unusual risks, in order to better prepare for a surprising future in the present.
FUTURE:CULTURE
The “Future, A Culture” aims to familiarize the members of an organization with literacy and future planning in order to create a more future-ready/fit and future intelligent organization.
THE WHY ?
Doing what we call FUTURES WORK begs the question of WHY? Here is a sample of some advantages (competitive, psychological, etc.), we think your organization would benefit from doing FUTURES WORK.
- Building FUTURES WORK capabilities, practices that will lead to an organizational’s own competence
- Future readiness, fitness
- Building your own tool box for each horizon
- Slowing the pace of change, lowering risk exposure through anticipation
- Moving beyond our mental models
- Moving beyond the official future and determinism
- Challenging and innovating business models
- Challenging system paradigms
- Better solving the change-continuity paradox
- Better solving the tension between the short and the long term
- Setting resilience as a minimum and antifragility as a level to reach
- Identifying the client of the future
- Understanding the Jobs-to-be-done in each horizon
- Leveraging a generic model for strategy making
- Your why #1 : ………………………………………………………………………………
- Your why #2 : ………………………………………………………………………………
- Your why #n : ………………………………………………………………………………
The Introductory Work
Unsure about what FUTURE WORK can do for your organization or you would like to get introduced to it as a good preparation for a larger scale commitment? These 2 workshops are exactly designed to do that. They are short but to the point in order to provide and understanding an clarity that are conducive to further your FUTURE WORK.
IntroFutur
To help organizations become familiar with futures studies or acquire futures literacy (in our jargon) and better understand what foresight or futures prospecting is, we offer an introductory session that covers why, what and how the future is created and what are the most used approaches and their respective objectives.
AltFutures
Since the future does not exist, it is therefore not singular but plural. If there are several, it is because they are different. The goal of the workshop is to introduce divergent or different types of generic futures. This workshop allows us to see, among other things, that by seeing only one future, we place ourselves in the precarious situation of not considering certain risks and opportunities.
LEADE or Local Entrepreneurial Advancement + Development Ecocsystem is a foresight infused framework for developping local economies.