Organizational futures thinking is accomplished by building a culture of engagement with the future. This requires intelligence gathering, collaborative exploration and creative thinking.

It starts with a futures assessment that looks at how the organization sees the future and how it thinks about its total situation, internally and externally, and its choices about moving forward. A range of information must be gathered and integrated: about the organization’s history and present situation, about its purpose, about its possible future environment (both expected and desired), about its strategic intention, and about the steps being taken to enact it.

Insight is gained by talking in depth to people inside and outside the organization about their perspectives on the changes taking place around them, to learn what they see as significant and to understand their picture of the future. The aim is to bring to the surface their prevailing mental maps of the organization’s strategic situation and its likely future(s). These findings are augmented with desk research into the emerging future to complement and corroborate the interviews.

This information is put into a form which allows it to be seen more or less at a glance, which means creating ‘visual language’ maps and diagrams which summarise the organization’s landscape and positioning, along with divergences of view, external challenges, etc. Descriptive names and vocabulary need to be developed to allow discussion of the emerging future(s), enabling fluency in working with the new ideas involved.

It is likely that this mapping and discussion will highlight, for example, gaps that need to be explored, differences of interpretation, possible forks in the road, and dilemmas. Strategic dilemmas can be fruitful areas of focus, since they represent necessary areas of choice where various options are in tension with one another, or are mutually exclusive.

An effective way to process future-facing questions is to hold a ‘strategic conversation’ about them. This is an interactive discussion where the facilitator acts as an enabling ‘guide on the side’, rather than a ‘sage on the stage’. The aim is to help participants zero in on the key issues and think creatively about how to frame and resolve them.

The aim of a conversation-based approach is to develop a future consensus in which the most promising direction for the organization becomes obvious to everyone, rather than leaving the future depicted in terms of ambiguous possibilities shrouded in a fog of uncertainty.

‘The future is not the destination, it is the map.’

We never arrive in the future, we always remain in the present. So the future as we suppose it to be is not a destination we ever reach, it is a map for our journey that exists in the present.

Synthesys’ aim therefore is to help you create the most effective possible map for your journey.