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Predicting Next Year’s Top Story

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Foresight can involve complex data gathering, sensemaking, and design and also be something as simple as developing the headline for next year’s news.

This simple technique can get your organization started on futures thinking and provide a way to connect the present situation with trends that you are seeing in your industry and the world to strategy and aspirations. This technique gets you to imagine the headlines of the future (what people are writing or saying about your enterprise) and walking back from that or projecting forward to fill in the steps that led you to that outcome.

Setting the Stage

This is an activity that is best done as a group anywhere from 4 to 12 people and can be done in as little as an hour, although it can be done over a longer period of time in single or multiple sessions if you wish to go deeper into the assumptions and models for the future.

It’s important to frame the exercise by choosing whether you want headlines for the organization or a specific project or product. It doesn’t matter who these imaginary headlines are to be written by (e.g., journalists, industry professionals), however, it does help to imagine what context they are to be written (e.g., news media, business press, industry news outlets, professional associations, peers). Make whatever context you pick clear even if it is in multiple contexts.

Next, set a time horizon for the headlines sometime within the next 6 to 12 months.

Lastly, this is often used to frame positive outcomes. However, after you’ve determined what success looks like it is worth considering repeating the exercise at a later date (e.g., one week later) with the converse: focusing on headlines that report failures, disasters, or problems. This can help your team see threats as well as possibilities.

The materials you will need are pieces of paper (preferably sticky notes because they are easily portable and can be re-arranged) and a whiteboard or flipchart/newsprint sheets of paper and markers for a facilitator (who can be external or a member of the team) and the team/participants.

Activity

Individually, have participants brainstorm headlines they imagine for the time horizon you have set. Give them about 5-10 minutes and ask participants to strive for volume — lots of ideas — over quality.

As a group, post together (with stickies) or share the ideas that individuals have generated. This can be done by having individuals post up their sticky notes on a wall and then later organized or by doing successive round-robin reporting where everyone presents a single idea in as many rounds as there are ideas.

We suggest having the group vote on headlines that they like, elicit the strongest reactions (positive or negative), or are the most provocative. Aim for 3-5 headlines. With these headlines explore as a group some of the assumptions that are in place for this headline to come true. The aim is to answer the question: what would have to happen for this to become a real headline?

Why?

This activity helps you set and frame a goal for your organization, project or product. It can help elicit information about what kind of aspirations, assumptions, and ideas that your team has about what you are doing. It will also allow to identify what kind of relationships, resources, or facilitators are needed to get from where you are to where you wish to go over the time horizon you’ve picked.

If you do the negative case headline, this technique can help frame what kind of necessary activities are required for success and where they can possibly go wrong. it will allow you to identify threats and risks associated with what you’re planning to help account for that in your plan.

This simple technique is powerful and can be used in a single session, with multiple units, or as part of a planning exercise and the dividends are great. It’s fun, creative, and informative.

If you want to see more about what this can do, contact us and we’ll gladly help you set up a foresight scan and strategic plan for your project or organization based on this kind of futures thinking.

Innovation Talent Inventories

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Faced with a situation or opportunity that demands you try something new or change what your organization does, the type of knowledge, skills, and experience required is often different than what is used to maintain the status quo. One of the most overlooked places to look for this talent is right under our noses — or beaks — and that your birds of a feather might be closer together than you knew.

An innovation talent inventory is an exercise that organizations are advised to undertake every 6-12 months (depending on the level of dynamism within the organization and industry) to assess the talent within your organization.

Why an Inventory?

Talent acquisition and retention is a costly part of organizational development. Hiring staff often means looking at a variety of skills, yet may only enlist a few of them for a specific job. Over time it becomes easy to lose track of or forget that your team may have skills and experiences that can be brought to bear on your current project.

The process of undertaking an inventory is also a means of recognizing and reminding your team of who is on it. By looking at your staff through the lens of innovation, it’s also possible to identify attributes that were not germane at hiring or recruitment but have evolved into a need at the present day. Whether its a certification course, extra-mural activities like coaching sports, or experience working in a particular sector, these previously non-recognized experiences can now serve to support your team’s innovation project.

Undertaking an Inventory

There is no prescriptive means of undertaking an inventory and we recommend the following:

Informal interviews. Simple coffee-time conversations can make a big difference and have the added benefit of allowing your team to build trust and commitment to the innovation project in the process. Toronto-based software firm Freshbooks encourages their team to go on ‘blind dates’ (not real ones) over coffee with staff in other departments so that they can learn from each other. Informality allows for conversations to wander to different parts of a persons’ career that might have been previously unexplored.

Resume reviews. Whether it is looking over your team’s personnel files or LinkedIn pages (all with permission and consent of your team, of course), a review of the current set of listed skills, experiences and certifications can jog your memory about what talent your team already has. Being transparent about why you’re doing this and ensuring that any exploration is done solely for the purpose of the innovation talent inventory is essential. This can be a powerful means for team and trust-building if done right and harmful if done poorly.

Surveys. A simple exploratory survey asking individuals to identify skills and abilities (less about knowledge) can catalogue your teams’ ideas and suggestions. The one risk with this approach is that many staff might still see themselves in their current role and frame their responses according to that. Like with the interviews, focusing on a person’s journey rather than their current destination is key.

Visual Mapping. Another fun and informative strategy is to use visual maps where individuals either self-plot or are plotted on a map of the situation. Plotting out the needs, wants, and opportunities on a simple large-sheet of paper and then having individuals place themselves closest to where they fit related to those needs, wants, and opportunities can be highly participatory. This works by having the page posted on a wall in a common area for a few days (e.g., coffee room) or using an electronic tool such as Miro or Mural.

Together, you will find yourself and your team learning much from what you already have and putting underused or unknown talents to work to help take your idea forward. You’ll know so much more about what you already know (and didn’t realize).

Need help putting this together? Contact us and we can show you how to engage your team and learn more, together, to set yourself for innovation, by design.

Innovation Implementation Index

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What does it truly mean to say that you are an innovative organization? One of the simplest, most powerful measures is implementation. How many innovative initiatives have you launched and put into the world?

There are arguments why the QWERTY keyboard is inferior to other designs, but there’s no argument that its the best innovation we’ve ever had when it comes to typing. Why? It’s the one that was implemented into practice.

Success Marks

Checkmarks on a list usually imply some kind of rote behaviour that isn’t suitable for innovation, although checklists themselves are useful for quality control. We prefer the idea of ‘success marks’ which indicate that an idea has been successfully taken from concept and put into practice — whether or not it yields desired outcomes.

As an index, we propose the following six metrics:

  1. The number of new initiatives that have been implemented into practice
  2. The number of projects that have developed prototypes that have been tested
  3. The prototype ‘death rate’: divide the number of terminated prototypes by the total number of prototypes developed
  4. The number of prototypes moved into implementation (* which is a similar, but not necessarily the same number as #1)
  5. The number of new initiatives started:
  6. The initiative death rate: divide the number of ‘new’ projects started by the number of projects implemented

Number 1 is the most important of all of these.

The reason we count all six as part of an index is that each of these represents some form of concerted action and effort toward moving ideas out of concept into action with the lowest number (Number 1) representing the highest value to the organization.

While having ideas is a precursor to prototypes we don’t we count this because it is easy to game this metric.

We also don’t believe in coming up with metrics about innovation or even prototype quality because the success of implementation and the quality of the prototype don’t always match. You can implement an idea that is still in development, yet still has value that can be realized right away.

Want to show how innovative you are? Consider scoring yourself on these metrics to see how much of what your organization does is talk and how much of it is action.

Want to move ideas into action? We can help. And we can develop the metrics to show what kind of impact your innovation has in the world. Let us show you how.

Forecasting

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You might not have a crystal ball, but you can still envision the near-future by using a simple strategy called forecasting to plot your strategy for the coming months. Here is how.

Fundamentals

A forecast is a data-driven prediction of possible outcomes that can be used to generate scenarios. The first item required is data. This can be qualitative, quantitative, or mixed and from primary or secondary sources. Most often, forecasts are a combination of these.

Checklists have been found to be useful tools to help organize data that contribute to forecasts. Pull together those sources you have and then organize them in a manner that allows you to build a narrative — a story — of what has happened to allow you to better anticipate what might happen.

Forecasts work when there is some expectation of a linear progression from time to time (with some variation). Time series data — data gathered on the same topic/issue/item multiple times over in succession — is among the most popular sources of data. This will allow you to see patterns and spot trends that lead you to now.

Add Imagination

Once you’ve developed a model of the present situation, the next stage is to imagine what might happen in the near future. Forecasts are generally useful for predicting near-term (e.g., 3-, 6-, or 12-months) outcomes and are less useful for longer-term assessments.

Next match data from other sources — social trends, government policy documents, census data — to create scenarios. For example, seasonal trends can change the near term. ‘Seasons’ like ‘back-to-school’, holidays, flu trends, weather changes can all affect how present data can mislead us for future activities. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an example of the various ways in which an economy can re-open, a healthcare system can respond, and what ‘back-to-school’ looks like.

From these data points, work together as a team (this is always better done in groups because different people will see data differently) we can start to envision possible futures and outcomes.

Look for amplifiers and dampeners. What things might make an existing trend more pronounced and what might dampen that trend, or extinguish it altogether. In discussion as a group you can

Structuring Forecasts: Tips & Tricks

Begin your group work together with a few simple ‘rules’ to guide your discussion. Start with limiting any feedback or critique of ideas at the start. You want to explore why something could happen, not assess the likelihood of such activities at first. This opens our minds up to unlikely scenarios.

It’s helpful to have someone on the team who can play the role of the ‘black hat‘ – the person whose role is to illustrate why something won’t work. Edward DeBono’s ‘thinking style’ roles can be useful here in helping us structure a way to look at the data and ideas from different points of view. Building on these different perspectives, it’s important to build a variety of scenarios and attach a level of anticipated likelhood to them. (e.g., high, medium, or low) and timing (e.g., imminent, soon, long-term, etc..)

Build out as many scenarios as the data suggests might be useful. This is often three to five, but rarely nine or ten.

From these scenarios, ‘walk them back’ to the present using an approach of asking “what happened just before X” and repeating that of each answer until you find yourself at the present. This allows you to start building pathways of potential causality.

While it may be that none of the scenarios come into reality, there are likely to be pathways that resemble them. When you find these, your team can use those to examine the assumptions that you hold with each one of them and use that to develop a strategy around them to better increase your anticipatory awareness and adaptive capacity to learn and act.

Taken together, this method can help you to see what might be coming and plan accordingly. It is a powerful means to explore near futures and design your organization to be better suited to living in them rather than having to play catch-up.

To go even deeper, the Future Today Institute has developed this useful ‘Funnel’ model to guide forecasting that might be useful to you as well.

FTI-Funnel ToolDownload

If you want to develop forecasts, contact us. We can help you see what might be coming and design your team to better meet it.

Camera Work and Cultural Probes

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Gathering insights about how people live, work, socialize and experience their world is one of the principal challenges facing innovators, design researchers or those looking to do design-driven evaluation. It’s easy to forget that most of us have access to a powerful tool for data gathering on our phone or in the body of a camera.

Camera work can be a great means for capturing social life and patterns. Whether it is through using a process like Photovoice or using it as part of an array of data gathering tools, cameras are often forgotten when we think about how to learn from our users. Let’s look at one way we can use cameras to support understanding our users’ context better: The cultural probe.

The Probe

A camera (or phone camera), notebook, and instructions are all that’s needed for your prospective users to turn their lives into an anthropological adventure. This method is user-focused and meant to involve your prospective users taking pictures and notes and thoughts about what they are recording. The instructions are tied mostly to the basics of photography (e.g., consideration of light, framing, and ethics of taking pictures of others, in certain settings, etc.).

Instructions can also focus participants’ attention on specific things. For example, you may wish to have your participants focus on a topic, setting, context, interaction, or situation — anything you want to learn more about. Keeping it too general is often not a good idea and can be anxiety- or confusion-provoking in your participants. If they are too specific, you might lose some of the creative possibilities.

The probe part of this method is the ‘thing’ you want your participants to focus on. The cultural part comes from what context, framing, explanation, or interpretation participants (and others) bring to the photos.

Interpretation & Expression

What makes the cultural probe method useful is that it allows for a guided activity that has a standard format while producing artifacts — pictures — that delve into the uniqueness of your users’ lives.

What participants choose to take pictures of can be instructive. It provides an opportunity to discuss why something was included and why other things might not be.

What context the photos were taken is also helpful as it indicates priorities, habits, situations, or choices that the participant makes.

Photographs provide a means to ask questions about what is in the pictures, how things are framed, and what kind of reflections are made by participants from the photos.

This method can also be used in group settings where people agree ahead of time (with the right to withdraw agreement, of course) to share some of the photos they take. It can be useful in times of conflict or ambiguity when participants themselves aren’t sure what is going on and collective sensemaking is needed.

The camera is a powerful tool. Its insights can help us design services and products better, create and learn more from people, and provide a means of qualitative evaluation data, too.

We love this method. If you want help using cameras as a storytelling, design, or evaluation tool contact us and we can help you along.