By Guest Contributor Erik Korsvik Østergaard

Maybe you have tried it already: An offsite team day with your business unit. There’s an inspirational talk about future trends, and a workshop on imagining life and work in 10 years.  There’s a nod to the idea that ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it,’ a notion variously attributed to the American President Abraham Lincoln or management guru Peter Drucker.

You draw detailed flow charts and role-play the future of work as you imagine it. In the end, a prize is given for the best breakthrough thinking, followed by a great dinner and entertainment. The following day, when you all get back to work, the emails have piled up, there are fresh fires to put out, and other than a fun shared experience, very little comes from it all.

I acknowledge that those sessions can work as one of several stimuli to get involved in Futures Literacy and Futures Thinking. But, I also question the long-lasting effect they have on the organization and the changes that are needed to become future-ready or future-proof, however you might define that.

Applying Futures Thinking on the inside of your organization is not a commonly embraced idea. It has not been widely investigated or described in the relevant literature, and does not have a natural or intuitive place in the modus operandi of most organizations. There are various reasons for this, but let’s look at the two challenges I hear of most often.

The challenge of ‘scale of magnitude’

Browse any airport magazine rack and you will find HBR, Wired, The Monocle and other business publications with similarly themed trend issues: ‘The 25 technology trends that you need to embrace,’ ‘10 shifts and shocks in organizations in the next 5 years,’ or ‘The 10 virtues of the future HR leader.’ The same goes for publications, typically around New Year, from the Big 5 management consultancies, OECD, the World Economic Forum, or respected Futures Thinking groups like Copenhagen Institute for Future Thinking (CIFS) and Institute for The Future (IFTF), or from academia.

Although these periodicals are well-known, well-researched, and well-written, they all have the same relevancy challenge for the leaders inside the organization. They address global megatrends — massive developments or disruptions in technology or society that are far beyond what leaders inside an organization need and want in order to transform their business unit.

First, the impact of the trends is on a different scale of magnitude, most often related to the market, customers, and how to adapt your products and delivery methods. That is the impact outside of the organization itself.

Second, decisions on experimentation with or embracing those trends are typically also referred to as ‘above my pay grade,’ hinting that these discussions are expected to take place at the senior management level, with the board of directors, and as part of the strategy updates. The good thing about these publications is that they ARE very inspirational and DO work as a catalogue of understanding the world.

The challenges of ‘I did not ask for options, I asked for a plan’

This is also known as, ‘Yes, I know I asked for input on the Future of Work, but what I was really looking for was an answer to our problems.’

Okay, let’s get the terminology sorted out in place first. ‘Future of Work’ is a concept of exploration and investigation of movements, trends and signals related to how organizations, leadership, culture, structure and governance at work are developing or might develop. It entails economic, sociological, technological, political and even philosophical questions and considerations. It transcends classical boundaries and is an interdisciplinary, multifaceted problem space that bleeds into many other relevant disciplines of abstraction.

New Way of Working is a more concrete description of how collaboration, communication and coordination can take place. The prefix ‘new’ creates an intuitive opposition to how the current way of working plays out and alludes to a change or transformation from what is today. New Ways of Working is an umbrella term, covering specific methodologies like Scrum and Sociocracy, more principle-based approaches like Teal or Agile, and human-focused, bureaucracy-busting designs like Humanocracy.[i]

Leaders may ask for some input on the Future of Work, but what they really want is a specific solution to their near-term problems, which more resembles the methodologies of New Ways of Working. Referring to the earlier description of Settlers and Explorers, these leaders are prototypical examples of Settlers: ‘We know where we are, and we know where we want to go. Just take us there, please. Do not bother us with this Future of Work nonsense, which doesn’t have an effect on us anyway.”

Now, these challenges are very real, so how can we overcome them?

Here’s a proven approach:

1. First of all, train yourself and your team in Futures Literacy and Futures Thinking. Read that again. You cannot do this without strengthening your capabilities and getting accustomed to describing and reframing your assumptions and myths. Having a strong sense of personal consciousness and organizational consciousness in your team is vital. This is a team sport.
2. Make the scope of the application of Future of Work smaller, so the ecosystem you work with has a horizon you’re familiar with, inside your organization. That can be your business unit or your network of teams. Context is king. Small is good.
3. Make the timeframe that you look at shorter. Five years typically seems to work.
4. Work with both external and internal signals and trends, so the forces and movements that affect you are relevant and sensible. This requires that you apply horizon scanning and look for signals and trends, inside the ecosystem we defined above.
5. Commit yourself to spend more time on exploring and evaluating the situation, signals and scenarios, rather than jumping comfortably to solutions. Get familiar with the possible discomfort of speculation.
6. Involve colleagues and stakeholders in your exploration efforts, getting their input and support.
7. Take all the methods, thinking patterns, tools and processes from Futures Thinking — which normally are applied with a longer timeframe and in a broader context on the outside of the organization — and flip them inwards on your transformation and change management efforts. You do not need to invent new mechanisms or tools. The existing ones are great; just use them on the ecosystem you defined above.

In this way, Futures Thinking becomes the catalyst vehicle that makes these two circles intersect: Where the Future of Work gets put into the context of inside the organization.

Consequently, New Ways of Working similarly gets contextualized with the input from the internal signals and trends, and with the boundaries of the ecosystem and timeframe.

Is this the only way to do it? No. Does it work? Yes.

When Futures Thinking is used as a vehicle for putting the Future of Work (or food, play, AI, sustainability etc.) into the context of the organization, tons of relevant experiences, learning and ideas emerge.

———————————————————–

[i] Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini. 2020. Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them. Harvard Business Review Press.

---

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

---

Suggested Reading

This book brings Futures Literacy, Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight into play in the tactical world of organizational change management — on the inside of your organization — to support leaders and organizations in activating their agency as change makers.

More information