Companies need to understand the future more than ever. Here’s how to integrate forecasting into your business

05/15/2024, 7:10 AM
fastcompany.com

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

Being a futurist or forecaster sounds like a pretty great gig. As Amy Webb, CEO of advisory firm Future Today Institute, describes it, the foresight discipline at many companies is typically part of marketing or innovation teams. Executive leadership sees these professionals “as the people who go out there and find us all the cool stuff that’s happening.”

However, Webb, whose firm helps clients plan for the future, urges her fellow futurists to closely align their work with corporate strategy rather than producing vision reports that are “full of aspirations and ambitions, and not at all tied to any strategic action,” she says. At a time when running a business is increasingly challenging and complex, foresight needs to work across corporate teams and leadership to create data-driven scenarios that will help leaders set strategy and make investments for the future, she says.

Building a future-focused culture

At the same time, companies can do more to get their employees to look around corners. I asked Webb, who specializes in strategic foresight, to share some ideas on how businesses can inject foresight into their organizations. She says companies committed to creating a forward-looking culture need to start with a robust and well-funded foresight team that could be a resource for the entire corporation. (A budget-constrained organization could opt to work with an outside firm with a process that meshes well with its own.) Human resources might tap the foresight team for a project on the future of work or hiring trends, for example, while the chief of procurement might want to jointly explore the role of artificial intelligence in supply chains. Future Today Institute helped a Norwegian media company successfully implement an internal “center of excellence” model that allows other departments to bring projects to its futurist team for collaboration.

Webb cautions against building up a foresight function, then treating it like a “skunk works” siloed from the rest of the organization. “There’s a couple of companies that come to mind that have their foresight labs in a separate building,” she says. In those cases, the futurists “are tinkering. They’re coming up with cool ideas, but they’re not helping solve strategic problems.”

Sharing the vision

To truly encourage a forward-looking culture, CEOs also need to communicate the importance of foresight, and leaders need to find ways to integrate conversations about the future into meetings and gatherings. Webb recalls attending a lunch with a small group of executives from a big oil company. Before the meal, everyone sat in silence for a moment before one of her dining companions launched into a short briefing about wildfire preparedness. Webb learned that the company values workplace safety, and whenever three or more employees get together, one person is required to make a few remarks about safety.

Webb has adopted a version of that at Future Today Institute. “We have a ‘moment of signals’ that we encourage all of our clients to do, and we do this ourselves,” she says. “Any time we have a meeting that has more than a few people in it, we start by asking, ‘What are a couple of signals of change that people have heard?’ It is a very fast way to keep that orientation to the future.”

Does your team look to the future?

Does your organization have a future-focused team? How do you integrate foresight into strategy and operations? How do you encourage employees to unleash their inner futurist? Send your ideas and anecdotes to me at [email protected]. I’ll share the most compelling ideas in a future newsletter.

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