Now, Take the Long View: Incorporating Studies of the Future into your Strategic Planning

Eric Garland
Competitive Futures, Inc.

To hear executives tell it, strategic planning is all about preparing for the future: exploring different scenarios, consider alternatives, and looking at "unintended consequences." But how often do you instead get bogged down in today's crisis, blindsided by internal politics, and stuck looking just at today? You know the real future is still out there, looming with threats and opportunities.

Many organizations hire futurists, experts in long-range trend analysis, to help decode the future. But what can you do every day to make sure your strategic planning is preparing for the future? The discipline of professional studies of the future can provide a vital tool to executives. Eric Garland is a professional futurist who trains executives at corporations and government agencies how to think about what's next, what might be a threat, and how can you profit.

The goal of this session for the Association of Strategic Planning is to introduce "futures studies," the analysis of long-term trends of society and technology out 5 - 20 years, to a strategic planning audience. The presentation will show how the futuring successfully complements the decision makers' needs for traditional five-year strategic plans.

Now, Take the Long View will present why executives undertake futures studies as a complement to traditional strategic planning. We will discuss the key values from studying the future, such as:

1. Challenge to your assumptions - You often don't know what you think about the future until you explore it.
2. A broader point of view - Systemic thinking reduces risk.
3. Anticipation of threats and opportunities - See profitable new possibilities and avoid potential downfalls ahead of your competition.
4. A sense of history - Understand what kind of world you are creating.

Also, the presentation will introduce the "Futurists Toolkit," the six tools every practitioner of strategic planning can use to bring their decision makers a perspective on the future, including:

• Systems analysis - Thinking about the ecosystem in which you operate
• Trend collection - Collecting the most reliable data
• Forecast evaluation - Knowing what the experts see driving the future
• Strategic implications - Deciding what the future could mean to your organization
• Scenario building - Creating stories that communicate a variety of possible outcomes
• Presenting the future to colleagues - Talking about the future even to the skeptical

Participants will leave with a better sense of how to study strategic trends for their own organization and will learn exercises to explore the future with colleagues.

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