LEF’s Dynamic Workplace workshop helps you identify and design the critical success factors you need to address in any change of working practice
Change is inevitable. Making time to think about the future and potential disruptions, beyond merely technology, is more important than ever before. Foresight helps us create the imagination space to reflect on potential intended and unintended consequences of actions and change. Looking back to look forward is essential as we reframe what we think.
Thinking about the future means learning to think differently. Emerging change will challenge our current assumptions, and over time our decisions, policies, and products today will become obsolete. Acknowledging, making room for, and working with disruption and convulsive change present new opportunities. Foresight helps by asking people first to make their assumptions explicit, and then to explore emerging change as a way to reframe what they think, what they want, and what they do.
Thinking about the future is a skill. It can be nurtured and developed but takes focus and effort. Horizon Scanning workshops are highly participatory, exploratory, provocative, and creative. They test our biases and our assumptions by taking a 360-degree view of change. We go on a journey where we learn how to look back at history, look forward at the possibilities, and create actions that bridge from today to tomorrow. And critically important, we also look at potential wild cards and their impact.
Our attention bias can often lead us to think that the current changes around us are more important, more frequent, and more impactful than the changes of the past. David Moschella highlights this in Seeing Digital where he compares the technology disruption of the two halves of the 20th century: “In comparing the two eras, we think it is indisputable that the last 50 years of information technology innovation have not come close to matching either the societal or economic impact of the 50 years before.”
Learn about changes that are already happening – in society, across cultures, within politics, in the economy, in science and technology, and in the environment – and how to respond to them. As we think about how nations, government, and companies, are responding to the challenges of the isolation economy in the 21st century, we now see technological adoption as essential to survival and no longer just a disruption to be contended with.
The most value of any Horizon Scanning work is the nature and quality of discussion, to tease out biases and test assumptions. Key to this is visually representing the changes of the past and current, and exploring the potential changes of the future. We help unlock the tacit knowledge within your organization and help you focus on what is most critical and important.
LEF has over 30 years of future thinking and strategy, having predicted the consumerization of technology and the advancement of China as a strategic player in the technology landscape:
This workshop series gives you and your team time to think collaboratively about what’s going on, what it could mean, and what you could do about it. It also allows you to filter disruptive trends while they are still at the noise level or seem to be so remote that are not associated with your business at all, which gives you additional time to prepare.
Workshop session
Outcome
Introductions & objectives Set the powerful question that will govern the four modules, discuss process, platforms & working principles
Set expectations
Shared history: waves of change creating the present Discuss & review shared history & lived experience, spot past disruptors & watersheds of change
Orient people to patterns of change & disruption; co-create a rich picture of today, informed by yesterday
Wardley mapping: where is here? Assess the present in terms of actors, components, connections: how are current value chains made up?
Understand the value chains in the present reality & emerging new reality
Emerging changes: horizon 3, the future What’s changing the world around us? Build out the horizon of potential disruptive change.
Learn to horizon scan & sense-make collaboratively using 3 horizons method
Futures wheels: impacts & impacts of impacts Work through possible impacts of changes, identify emergent value chain opportunities & challenges for horizon 2
Taster of futures wheels as a technique; explore 2nd & 3rd order impacts of disruptive changes
Challenges & opportunities: horizon 2 inside-out & outside-in Extend the map: what disruptions can be leveraged in horizon 2? What novel ‘genesis’ ideas can be incubated?
Complete understanding of combined Mapping/3 Horizons/Futures Wheel
New stories for our futures: horizon 2, the change space What will accelerate the evolution of the value chain? Tell the story of the possible new offering, select the best stories
Consolidate process outputs into real life organizational contexts
Confirm what next Reflect on the process & its products; agree next steps
Agreed action plan, for those present & for the organization
