Future-proof strategies enable the recognition of emerging patterns and the development of adaptive capacity to coexist with them.
Given the context of the pandemic, in 2020, most organizations focused on managing the crisis, ensuring operational continuity, and navigating uncertainty, postponing strategic planning until the storm calmed down. It was what had to be done.
But nearly a year has passed, and the storm doesn’t seem to be abating. Strategic questions become increasingly evident: Where are we heading now? How can we plan in an environment of such uncertainty?”
Single and Linear Future?
In the last twenty years, strategic planning horizons have been shrinking as the pace of change accelerates: ‘Too many things will change in five years so we will create a two-year strategy.’
Consequently, this business-as-usual approach assumes that a strategic plan must be based on a single and linear future forecast. To do this, it extrapolates historical data, identifies current trends, and assumes that today’s variables will be relevant in the future.
This perspective has been passed down from generation to generation because it has been effective in the past and has found a standard way of addressing organizational challenges in order and achievement.
By following these approaches, stability, leadership, and clarity are sought in the face of what lies ahead, but it really creates a (false) sense of security while remaining blind to the unexpected.
However, organizations require new approaches to navigate these volatile and complex times. In this regard, the design of strategies must go far beyond the analysis of hard data. Organizational skills must be developed to recognize emerging patterns and build adaptive capacity to coexist with them. That’s what strategies are all about.
Future proof
“Future-proof” strategies: scanning 3 signals
To achieve this, it’s necessary to enhance the diversity of perspectives and create a system that allows scanning signals of change from 3 angles:
1. From manifestation
Consider cultural, economic, technological, environmental, and political manifestations.
2. From origin
What has changed since its origin? What cultural or value system change is driving this trend?
3. From impact
What thoughts, social structures, services, or products could emerge?
“Future-proof” strategies: An organizational immune system
Thus, based on the evolutionary design of futures, this emerging approach to strategies acts as an organizational immune system against the challenges of a volatile context. It doesn’t predict the future, but it visualizes how, in the present moment, we can strategically leverage and influence the futures that attract and call us the most.
Certainly, organizations like Shell, Intel, and Disney, among others, apply this discipline to reinvent themselves constantly.
Its value lies in systemic thinking in which the analysis of emerging patterns is integrated into organizational processes and provides vital links between them.
For example, strategy development, innovation, risk management, public affairs, and leadership development.
In this way, the habit, deeply rooted in most, of assuming that the future will closely resemble the present is broken. This is one of the clearest manifestations of living in already outdated cultural patterns.
Authors: Pablo Reyes and Bárbara Ferrer
The article was originally published in Clase ejecutiva UC on April 6, 2021.
