Thriving in An Age of Discontinuity: Strategic Foresight Practice

today we are really privileged to have Cole Oman with us to explain why understanding and practicing strategic foresight is necessary to navigate uncertainty manage across time Horizons and build agility and resiliency within organizations to ensure long-term success Cole is a foresight leader in the office for the future at Deloitte a Professional Services firm with a stated purpose to make an impact That Matters by creating trust and confidence in a more Equitable Society as a foresight leader Cole helps future-proof organizations he consults on nascent Technologies and discontinuous forces and leads teams in the development of robust solutions to address the most significant challenges facing business in society today Paul also has experience in the monitor Deloitte strategy practice which includes scenario planning competitive response customer strategy and artificial intelligence and now it is my pleasure to introduce Cole Oman Paul Welcome to our virtual protein thank you um as mentioned my name is Cole lohmann I am I help lead strategic foresight in Deloitte and I'm just really pleased to be with you here today uh really excited for the conversation um as I mentioned being at Deloitte and in the office for the future our real mandate is to help future-proof Deloitte as an organization so that primarily happens within three programs which is program one of ours is Horizon 3 or future ofs so that's really looking 10 years into the future in partnering with our industry leadership to help them Define a vision of what the future of their industry is going to look like and then what the Strategic implications of that are in terms of the way in which that their business needs to shift and then the way in which they go to market to help assist clients within their industry the second here is foresight capacity building or really building robust capabilities of strategic foresight within our organization and helping to scale that across the Enterprise and then the third is redesign of our business which is really thinking through based on what our views of the future are future is three years and 10 years from now kind of what does that mean in terms of the shifts that we need to make in the next one to three years in terms of Investments we put down the capabilities we need to build in the next five to seven years they'll really position as well for the future seven to ten years from now so with that introduction I want to give a little overview of this moment in time of what we're calling the poly crisis so the polycrisis is a term that you may have been hearing recently you know it's been used by the world economic Forum it was kind of the term of uh of popularity at Davos a couple months ago and as you can see here we really are in a poly crisis you can see we're coming out of covid-19 in the aftermath of that pandemic there's a war in Ukraine that's currently raging there's this new kind of burgeoning new Cold War potentially between the US and China there's this existential threat of climate change that may be the most significant uh challenge of our time and that's not even including other things like wealth and income inequality the political polarization that we're seeing at the moment both in the U.S and abroad you know inflation in the ranking recent banking crisis with uh Silicon Valley Bank and generative AI which may be the most significant stepwise technological change of our time so there really is just this is a profound moment in time where things seem to be just the speed and significance of change is really really profound at the moment but it's not just this moment but we're really in a broader age of discontinuity and that comes down to really five significant forces here that I'm just going to quickly overview and highlight we're seeing radical shifts in science and technology you know over the last 60 years we've ridden the wave of Moore's law that has really used Computing and software to really change the world around us in the digital space we've seen new technologies as I mentioned through generative AI that now we're on the precipice of potentially a second Scientific Revolution that is really going to transform the world around us and is really breaking the bonds of correlation and causation of Science in the past that are going to allow us to make just these significant Innovations um that will change the world around us you're seeing globalization being reinvented and the return of active governments you know since the 1980s from uh the views of Milton Friedman through fa Hayek in The Chicago School you really saw the expansion of neoliberalism and globalization and in the U.S that was known as something as the Washington consensus which was something that we all recognize as you know low taxes Global free trade low regulation um really things that kind of opened up through Ronald Reagan here in the U.S and has really carried us up until the financial crisis of 08. we're now seeing that that prototype really no longer works and that's really causing some of the significant changes that we're seeing in governments both here in the U.S as well as abroad and alluding to some of the things that we're seeing that I mentioned earlier between this new cold war between the US and China but it's also the rise of networked power is causing some of this instability you know as I was talking about with radical science and technology and what's happened over the last 60 years one of the main things that's happened is the world is just way more connected than it's ever been before we all have you know these smartphones in our pocket that allow us to communicate at the click of a button and it allows us to have instantaneous communication which is really allowing for new network power to emerge you know you've seen just in the last three to five years things like black lives matter or me too or these kind of emergent Network social changes and that's really putting stress on the system of old Power structures and so we're seeing this balance of top-down hierarchical power with bottom-up command and control and that's really leading to this lap this second to last shift here about the need for stakeholder capitalism and the real uh internalization of externalities and so there's more demand of business and what's being spec expected of businesses but also of politicians of social organizations and institutions and finally all of this is leading towards the decline of really The Firm or an organization operating individually in a vacuum and the rise of the ecosystem as the new unit of analysis it's no longer these goit alone individual organizations but one must really think about how they're connected to the broader system of all these interconnected ecosystems so with that table setting I think it's you know potentially easy to see how why do we need to practice foresight well there's a lot that's really changing I think there's three real kind of objectives of foresight which is one to provide illumination or to elucidate and bring Clarity the second is to really navigate through this moment in time and to better understand where we're going but the third one here I think is really important and is something that needs to be more emphasized within strategic foresight and is growing more and more and that is activation which is that we're not really passive recipients the future but we have agency and we can actively shape the future that we want so really the benefits of strategic foresight it's not about you know we're not soothsayers no one here knows what the future holds and we don't say that we can predict the future no one really can predict the future no one has a crystal ball as you can see on the left but it's really about embedding you know the ability to think in new ways bring about agility and flexibility and resiliency it's about really having adaptability and being able to test new strategies and think in new ways and finally having the confidence to move and actually activate based on all the preparation that's been done you know I love this quote by Charlie Munger he is you know the best friend in uh you know the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett and he said you know personally I've gotten to where now I really use a two-track analysis which is first what are the factors that govern the interests involve and second what are the subconscious influences where the brain is automatically doing things and what I like to you know shorthand this too is basically saying really what are the forces in play and what are the things that leads our mind astray and those are the real two fundamental things that drive proper foresight thinking and having successful outcomes so I'm actually going to dive into the second one first which is around the subconscious influences in play so here's a quick visual and on the left you see a map of California from the 16th century and then one now on the right of California that we now know from today and I think this is really great because there's this concept of mental models which is you know having these different tool kits to apply to problems in order to think in a better way and what I love about this is really map and territory is a mental model but I would view it almost as The Meta mental model of all models which is to say that there is a reality out there that has infinite depth and complexity and richness to it and what we're trying to do is really find a way to provide the right map to navigate through that super complex reality and so on the left you know you can see that what are sometimes not having the right map can lead you astray and having an appropriate map can help lead you properly into the future so why do we not have a proper map when we're thinking to do strategic foresight well really this is at the heart of evolution and this these three pieces I've taken from a man named Michael Levin who is a developmental biologist as well as a synthetic biologist and he said something that I think is so true here which is really there are three things that govern any biological organism and that's active inference minimize surprise and metabolic constraints so active inference is you know based on what I see what can I infer about what's going to happen minimize surprise if I'm living in a world of danger and scarcity and privation how can I make sure that nothing happens that's going to put me at risk and Melody and metabolic constraints which is I have a limited amount of energy and I can only do certain things at certain moments right well that leads to three cognitive biases that really constrain Us in myopic thinking I call that the dark Triad of myopic thinking so the first is is availability bias which is active inference is only on the available information that we have the second minimized surprise then goes to really confirming what we've already seen so I want to reconfirm what I already think is the case so I minimize the surprise that's out there and the third is metabolic constraints which is I'm constrained in what I can do and so therefore I'm going to maintain the status quo generally and that has worked really well for us as evolutionary preachers in the past because we lived in a world of danger and scarcity and privation where if you didn't use these tools you would potentially die however we now have evolved out of that world of danger and scarcity privation and so we're looking for new tools because what has gotten us here will not get us there so how do we combat that well we move to using strategic foresight and the principles of foresight there's really three and I call this the Holy Trinity of Futures thinking which is first how do we combat availability bias well we think outside in instead of inside out instead of thinking of just what I can see in my individual limited experiences we seek an outside in view of all the major forces in play and what's happening the second is how do we combat confirmation bias well we're ceneric based instead of reconfirming what we already see we look to think in different ceneric ways of what's outside what would be confirmed of what we already see so thinking scenarios versus single outcomes and the third here is how do we combat status quo bias we think future back instead of today forward so instead of taking the status quo and moving incrementally forward in a small limited way we actually move to the Future and then think backwards from that into back passing and when those three things come together that's how you start to move towards a beauty of foresight so once we bring those new mindsets and muscles into play one of the most effective things towards success is really defining the problem and that's effective framing so I love this quote by Albert Einstein which is you know it may be apocryphal but it's something to the words of the effect of if I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 50 minutes defining the problem and I think there's so much wisdom in that statement and if you look here we really like to think about problems in three ways there are type 1 problems which would be called technical problems the problem is clear the solution is clear it's just about putting best practices together the second is conceptual problems which is the problem is clear but the solution is unclear and so we put a process or an approach together in order to attack that the third is Type 3 problems which is unclear problems and unclear Solutions and that's really what strategic foresight is at its core and so that is a wicked problem and Futures thinking is a Type 3 problem and so it's very important to realize that and realize what it takes in type 3 problem thinking of Futures thinking which is significantly different than type 1 and type 2 problem thinking so moving forward with that apologies I think I've up there moved how do you structure a process to do that what is a Type 3 problem look like when doing strategic foresight well once you frame the problem appropriately then it's about exploring the search space and to me I also like this concept that I think comes from Donald Rumsfeld about no knowns known unknowns and unknown unknowns and he said you know it's not the no knowns or the known unknowns that really put you at risk but it's the things that you don't even know that you don't know right so going through that how do we think about that when doing strategic foresight and Futures thinking well we first go to our known nodes and we say okay what do we know about this problem and we collect all the data that we already have related to that and we codify that so it's there and clear and clean the second is we have a set of known unknowns that we need to learn more about and that's how you go through research you do expert interviews You observe things that you're seeing and then you clearly Define those things and structure them but it's really the unknown unknowns where the magic of strategic foresight happens and that is expanding into those blind spot spaces of things that you're not even aware of and what you do for that is you do scanning you do sensing you frame these unknown unknowns up so that you can learn more about them you go on learning Journeys but really what I'm going to talk about more and one of the main tools that's used for strategic foresight is building scenarios and that goes back to those three principles I told you about which is thinking instead of in a singular way in a ceneric way so let's think about building scenarios what does that look like well first you need to determine the forces so we've talked about how your mind can lead you astray now you need to understand what are the forces at Play Or the critical drivers of the future so we like to bucket this in mainly three ways the first here is thinking about the external environment and there's a great acronym that's broadly used within strategic foresight which is that of steed social changes technological changes economic changes environmental changes and political changes and so understanding really what are those five major categories and what's happening in the external environment that's framing the current situation the second is thinking at your Marketplace level and that may have a business connotation to it but mainly what it is is what's the domain or field that you're operating in that's the second area that you need to understand so what are the Dynamics at the industry level of that specific domain what are the unmet needs of your customers or whoever your clients are in that area what are your competitors doing comparatively to what you're doing and who are the stakeholders in your specific domain and what is the user journey of the individual consumer or customer client and what are the steps they go through that's the marketplace then the third is understanding your organization what are your business models of that of you and your competitors what is the product and services that you're currently offering your operations capabilities what are the technologies that are feeding into that management systems and having a proper understanding of these three things helps you frame the critical drivers that are in play now once you've done that the magic comes in building potential Futures there's four classic ways that you can go about this the first is a deductive approach which relies on taking those forces and building them into uncertainties here would be an example of a critical uncertainty um urbanization over the next 10 years right there's one side of that which is urbanization continues due to the benefits of having a symbiotic environment and a knowledge economy that brings together thinkers and the Arts and universities and um you know funding mechanisms similar to Silicon Valley the other side of that uncertainty might be something like actually urbanization will recede due to new technologies and the ability for remote and hybrid work and what one can do is taking all the uncertainties put them on two by twos and build scenarios in each of those four quadrants that would be the deductive approach the second is a more deliberate or explicit approach which is what is the consensus future that we think people generally believe to be true we might call that the expected future and then what we would do is say well what would an optimistic future be one that we would want to shape or bring about to come to be and a second would be what's a challenging future or one that we're unprepared for that we might need to be better prepared for into the future right and then we would start to build out what those Futures look like a third way is an inductive approach which is Building bottom-up stories from those drivers that you have and bringing them together to create a narrative or a potential different scenarios and a fourth here would be something which we call like the quick and go method which is take four different uncertainties throw them together and start to build out what a story of those Futures are I've used all four of these scenarios they all have their benefits and their drawbacks in certain ways and certain trade-offs however they're all very very valuable in creating stories and scenarios about the future and bringing together these different scenarios we're able to crowdsource ideas about what the future holds and one just you know further thought around that I would say is we use these to really in a jungian way crowdsource the collective unconscious of all different experts and people thinking about what the future holds across a variety of different domains and expertises and then from that we're able to explore the bounds of our unknown unknowns and realize what is potentially possible in these different futures now why is it critically important to build scenarios and stories well here's an example I would give you what can you learn from this chart here that I'm presenting to you now looks like you have some names of different people here Papa and Mama and Goldilocks and you know the species of what they are in different ages and you know what's the different appetite level and how big are they and what do they like in certain porridge right you can see a variety of different data and data is very important but it's you know the thing now and the about how important data is right but what do you learn from this data now when I show you this what do you learn from this you immediately recognize the old story of Goldilocks in the in the Three Bears right once upon a time there was a little girl named Goldilocks and she went for a walk in the forest and you know the porridge was too hot and this really shows you the importance of stories that individuals learn through stories they conceptualize information through stories they're able to really um move forward and learn and grow and prepare through stories and that's what scenarios provide so once you've crowdsourced a set of scenarios and you have a variety of different stories and scenarios then what's next step from that well it's crafting a narrative which is bringing Clarity and agency to the Future so as I mentioned before at the beginning of this talk one of the important things and benefits of strategic foresight is bringing Clarity to the current moment it's about Illuminating and elucidating the current situation but it's also about navigation and activation and that's where agency comes in which is it empowers us to confidently make decisions and move Beyond being just passive recipients of the future but actively shaping and creating a future that we want so what we can do is taking that Narrative of all these different stories from scenarios together this is the general scaffolding and structure of how we would build a narrative which is think about this moment in time what is currently happening what is the burning platform of why things need to change how can we look back in the past at what's happened to understand how we've gotten to you today based on that of the past in the current moment what is the essence or Evergreen nature of what is happening so for example an automobile in the past right we might be thinking about the future of consumer and thinking about automobiles but what I would argue is the essence or Evergreen nature of what a automobile company is bringing is mobility it's not about the car itself the innate job to be done or Essence or Evergreen role is to bring someone from point A to point B and so understanding that no matter whether you're in the past and it's a horse whether it's an automobile whether it's an airplane or whether it's some rocket ship in the future the Evergreen nature here the unmet need of the individual is finding a job to be done of moving from point A to point B then using that what is the critical drivers of the future as in what are these drivers as I mentioned earlier that are going to be determinants of where the future goes based on all of these Futures that we've created we can now we can then interrogate into them and say what is what is similar across all of these Futures what is everyone saying what is different across these Futures what are the themes that we're seeing thread between all of these Futures and that allows us to then identify what is prudent to assume about the future if everyone across all scenarios saying something it's pretty prudent to assume that this is going to be a driver of the future what is uncertain about the future what is different across these different Futures that we're seeing and then finally what we do is use all this to create a vision of where do we want the future to go what would we age genetically shape about what the future is going to bring and based on all that of The Prudent assumptions about the future the critical uncertainties and the vision of where we want the future to go what does that then mean the Strategic implications of that bar what are the unmet needs of individuals and consumers in that world who are the winners and losers in that type of world and then finally what are the opportunities the risks and strategic positioning of our individual organization and what we need to to do in order to be prepared for these different Futures in the vision that we're trying to create so what that really comes down to is how can we manage across time Horizons to then start to put down the Investments today to build into the capabilities of tomorrow in the next three to five years to then be prepared to have a strategic set of bets laid down to then in the future seven to ten years from now be well positioned to deliver on the business models and the services and the mission and vision of what we want 10 7 to 10 years from now in the future so this is extremely important and something that I think is a glaring hole within strategic foresight broadly within um the practice and what I see in a lot of different places um as well as uh what a lot of different experts in strategic foresight and that's not a judgment that is just to say you know um have you not support necessarily the philosophy of this person but I think Karl Marx has a great line where he said uh in the past philosophers of the world have only tried to describe the world but it's in but it's important like the real question is how can we change it it's not about just philosophers interpreting the world but it's about changing the world and here is we can learn so much about strategic foresight we can do all the mental exercises of understanding what's happening in the world but the point is is how do we move from foresight to Insight to understand the Strategic implications of that and here I love this great three by three which is strategy happens at the at the intersection of scenarios which is what is the future business environment what's happening Vision what's our strategic intent of what we want to be and then capabilities who are we and how are we going to win and that is really the Strategic implication moving from foresight to Insight about what does it then mean based on what we've seen it isn't just a intellectual exercise at foresight it's about actually making changes so then based from foresight to Insight how do we move from insight to action so so moving from the so what to the now what what do we actually do and here's a variety of different tools that we use in strategy but that's you know let's set a vision and a mission and a purpose let's then think about across the ambition Matrix what are the transformational bets we need to lay down what are the adjacent bets we need to lay down and how do we double down into our poor business you know how do we innovate across the 10 types of innovation and how do we make sure that then we Define that in a strategy through the Strategic Choice Cascade that shows us you know what is Our Winning aspiration where do we want to play how do we want to win what capabilities do we need to build from what Management Systems we need to put in place to reinforce that so again doing foresight strategic foresight at the earliest top of the funnel is great and informative but it's about how are we then going to use that to execute how are we going to move from foresight to Insight and insight to action and that brings about then the fourth key principle that I've alluded to which is you know I talked about moving from out inside out to outside in moving from today forward to Future back moving from single outcome to scenario this brings us to the fourth principle which is how can we think across time Horizons how can we manage Horizon 3 to anticipate to inform Horizon 2 to then inform Horizon one and if we're thinking outside in future back sonaric and across time Horizons and we're moving from foresight to Insight and insight to action that is really where everything comes together into a beautiful formulation of strategic foresight finally putting it all together what would something like this look like well it would be some form of having a perceiving mechanism that's looking at Trends management to critical drivers as I mentioned then moving to identifying opportunities in some form of across the different transformation you know ambition Matrix you then would build out scenarios and build out what potential business models would look like then accelerate some of these into incubation and then really map those and Implement and execute so what's an example of something like this so at our firm in our in my group in strategic foresight we LED some work related to the future of TMT what we now have called the five worlds so we looked at what is the world of technology look like five years from now when we came to this going through the process that I just you know Illustrated came to this of the five worlds and I'll give a you know I know we're coming up on time here but I'll give a quick overview of this which is inner World which is technology wants to come inside the human being and augment and live symbiotically with individual you know I'm sure a ton of people are wearing Apple watches right now or whoops or aura rings but this is going to change even more so in the future into things like crispr cast 9 and synthetic biology and other ways in which that technology is going to conform to the individual mirror World very similar to the metaverse which is technology wants to create a digital replica of the physical world as well as new ones and as much as you know the metaverse and uh Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about that I think one thing that he has gotten right here is this sense of presence and embodiment which is you know right now as I'm speaking to you I'm on a 2G screen you know I'm very you know not I you don't feel like we're together was that's what the promise the metaverse really has off-world which is technology wants to move beyond our planet you know think about starlink and what's happening right now with SpaceX and what Elon Musk has been able to do with that company and providing you know internet to Ukraine during the war we're going to see even more of that but the proliferation is going to move to you know the ability to build Mega structures that are built out into space and colonization so off-world will be the next Frontier War World technology is always augmented conflict and how we operate with conflict whether it's a club a sphere a rifle you know a rocket a plane we've always used technology to augment combat but this is going to move to New forms of misinformation and disinformation that we're seeing you know new forms of psychops we're already seeing certain things of synthetic media and so this is really going to change the way in which Warfare is even done and then finally habitable which is technology wants to heal our planet and there's a proliferation of new technologies that are clean energy and other ways that we're looking in carbon sequestration to really heal our planet so these are the five worlds that we came up with through going through the Strategic foresight process but then we move from that to action which is the next slide that I'm going to show you here which is converting that into Partnerships with clients to start to build out this vision for better of these different five worlds we are at a pivotal inflection point many foundational beliefs and behaviors that have prevailed for more than 30 years are unraveling rapidly and technology is at the heart of that change welcome to the worlds of 2030 an immersive experience designed to explore and co-create potential Futures while Society has historically determined the impact of technology now technology is so powerful that it's altering Society whether we intend it or not potent technology Trends are driving the emergence of the five future worlds highlighted in this experience each worth trillions of dollars and each holding the potential for both promise and Peril these worlds are closer than we think the question for every leader now is are we comfortable letting the future be determined by default or do we want to determine the future by Design come experience the worlds of 2030 in the Deloitte Greenhouse right so moving to the final slide here and I want to make sure we have enough time for Q a here and I know I'm about five minutes over the last thing that I want to say is just to offer uh my sincere gratitude and appreciation to be able to speak to this group I you know want to say thank you and you know I want to recognize the difficulty of this current situation you know it may feel like we're on a dire trajectory currently with all the things that I you know highlighted in the public crisis in the time of discontinuity and I also understand you know the tyranny of the now that really adds to this which makes it difficult sometimes to think about the future and I know I don't need to say this to this group who all many are steeped in strategic foresight but there is a cost to not thinking about the future and sometimes that cost can be existential both for an organization as well as for society more broadly and what we're entering into in this you know era of climate change and generative Ai and what that offers even in you know in some risk with that um and so I think there's a cost not thinking about the future and so remembering the importance of strategic foresight and remembering that as I've said we don't need to be passive recipients of the future but we can actively shape and create the future that we want and we have agency in order to do that and so with that you know I just want to thank you for your time

2023-04-24 13:31

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