Picking the Right Futurist for Your Strategic Insights
When I look at my overall client types, it seems to me that I have two main types of client. The first is a client that has a good business and is generally successful and wants a futurist to help keep them ahead of emerging issues and opportunities. The second main client type is one that feels their organisation has or is hitting a brick wall, that has experienced a lack of success through past approaches to developing insights and strategy and that the ‘something’s gotta change’ mantra has emerged inside the executive team. Which is why the brief becomes important
The brief to your futurist is aimed at ensuring you know why you want a futurist to help you. If you are not clear on what a futurist can (and cannot) do, it is likely you’ll spend company resources seeking answers to a question that won’t help. Simply put, your expectations will not be met.
In the client types above, typically the client that is happy with how things are going wants to a) ensure they aren’t going to be surprised by an unexpected downturn, and b) seek even more opportunities to develop their business further. That framework sets to approach a furturist ought to take.
The client that has a realisation that what they’ve been trying hasn’t been working requires a VERY different approach. It is likely that the need for more immediate impact, less theory and more pragmatic decision frameworks will be needed. For some clients what they want a futurist to do cannot be done – the n eed for a turn-around specialist aiming at saving a business is NOT a core capability of a Futurist. It is something I’ve been asked to do from time to time. I have instead referred the business on to someone else.
Which comes down to the idea of how you Brief your Futurist. Following this model, any futurist worth their salt will be able to tell you whether what you want is realistic in the time frame and aligned to high quality futurist thinking. They should also be able to advise you AGAINST using their skills if your needs are different to what can be provided. Given the organisational time, people and financial resources you could invest, both you and your futurist ought to be clear before you begin and agree on an assignment
And of course if you have any questions, by all means contact me
With the moderately surprising news that Christine Milne had decided to step out of her current political life, Dr Richard Di Natale moved into the driver’s seat for the Greens. And I flag that this spells trouble for the National Party because this shift, this change in voice and style, connected to similar passions, will…
Read More >In fact I’ll go one step further and say that many Strategic Plans are DELIBERATE methods for NOT Progressing. In far too many organisations, the process of Strategic Planning is about compliance to a process of ‘having a plan’ and typically it has nothing to do with achievement of the outcomes listed in the Strategic…
Read More >Around Australia and parts of the world like the USA, some governments and especially many large scale power utilities, are pursuing a campaign to prevent domestic solar from being fed back into (sold to) the grid. I’m assuming that the (fundamentally flawed) thinking is that by denying additional energy production points, they’ll prop up or…
Read More >I’m male. You may like to take that into consideration with the rest of what you read as, a) I’m part of the problem b) Whatever I say cannot, no matter how well intentioned, be in anyway able to represent women I’m prompted to write this particular piece following on from the ABC’s…
Read More >On a day when The Age front page ran a story of mass disconnections of householders struggling to pay their domestic electricity bill, Futurist Marcus Barber and ABC Goulburn Murray’s Joseph Thomsen discuss the future of energy – what’s happening now, what are we going to see in the future and what can consumers…
Read More >With Farmland across NSW, Queensland, & the Northern Territory under pressure from the mining sector, the quality of discussion as to which land use is of best outcome or most suitable seems to go astray. I’ve been flagging the ‘Eat’ OR ‘Extract’ challenge for a few years now and this radio interview is one example…
Read More >For the past few years I’ve decided to declare each year to be something I think the world needs or is likely to see. It’s not so much about the prediction but more about the likely focus that will benefit the world. So I’m declaring this year to be the International Year of Battery Technology…
Read More >I keep reading posts that Uber is an example of the ‘sharing economy’, the one in which people freely share what they have with others. But it’s NOT – it is instead part of what I call the ‘Utilisation Economy’ which is about use of spare capacity. About 15 years ago I began writing about…
Read More >One of the reasons I founded The Australian Strategic Planning Institute was to ensure that high quality futures perspectives were included in the Strategic Planning process. Typically they were not which meant too many businesses and organisations were planning for futures that just would not exist as expected, meaning wasted resources and sometimes and marked…
Read More >As Victorian edges its way into a new drought phase and plays catch up to other parts of the country, I’ve been pushed to remember an article I wrote about our then State Government’s push to get people to reduce the length of their showers. The Four Minute Shower was an attempt to highlight just…
Read More >