Corporate futuring
Chapter 4 - Corporate futuring
Corporate futuring - Next page: Value realisation
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Welcome to the Corporate futuring page
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Can you only see, at first sight, a cross, giving you a blocking feeling? Strategy can be overwhelming.
Did you notice the inside-out flow shaping outside-in? These dynamics represent the future of your venture.
It’s about “the next best thing” in the direction of travel you’ve put forward. The final destination is partially unknown. Along the way, you’ll discover new things, learn, adapt, try and fail, and keep assessing where you are about where you want to go (which may also change).
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What is Corporate futuring about?
Why
The outcome of Corporate futuring is about:
- imagining a better future for your enterprise and all stakeholders
- preventing future problems so that you can achieve success
- mitigating perpetuating current issues that would block your future success
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How
Corporate futuring is about creating and maintaining your enterprise strategy. It consists in the first place of 'Long-term Thinking', 'Ethical Decision-making', and your 'Operational strategy':
- The core of Corporate futuring is helping you to make those decisions that enable future decisions
- The decisions of the past created the position you are in today
- 'Now' is the moment to make those decisions that will shape your future
- Decisions who have the highest probability to create value for all stakeholders
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What
We go one step beyond solving easy or complicated issues, providing help with complex, wicked questions about the future of your business.
Corporate futuring unites your inside-out and outside-in view through the process of
- creating direction:
- Vision, Strategy, Tactics and your Mission
- implementation
- defining the next step to take
- and solving your current problems
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The situations where Corporate futuring offers an answer
If you are an entrepreneur, a start-up, a scale-up, an sme with big ambitions, or if you are right in the transition phase between generations, a more subtle situation dictates your need for strategic thinking:
- a feeling of being at the top of a prosperous area (the famous S-curve), it can only go down
- a need for new beginning (organisational innovation, product- and/or service innovation)
- an uncertainty about being in a transition phase (not knowing what it will take and lead to)
- a changing context (aka market situation)
- a feeling of becoming obsolete
- ...
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Triggers leading towards the need for a new Operational Strategy
First and foremost, your business operates in its context:
- the shortage in the labour market. The number of employees forces you to review your processes and, therefore, also your strategy.
- the social revolution towards a green economy. New ways of working ask for new ways of strategising: ESG.
- changes in your market force you to choose a new path.
- changes or transitions in your organisational structure necessitate a new strategy.
- ...
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Strategy is making those decisions that enable future decisions - S. Vermeylen
Not making decisions is, by definition, leaving the critical decisions for you and your business to the context in which you operate.
If it works out well for you, you're in luck. If not, you're out of luck. Therefore, it is better to make strategic decisions.
They are not the decisions you make to take operational actions tomorrow but those that make it possible to make correct, or even better, operational decisions in the foreseeable future.
Strategy is - parallel to your financial investment - the mental investment you and your employees make to improve your assets, structures, human capital, resources, customer portfolio, goods and/or service offerings. In short, strategy matters most to your business in order to enhance and grow.
Your enterprise core strategy consists of:
- Long Term Thinking
- The decisions of the past created the position you are in today: NOW
- Ethical Decision Making
- 'Now' is the moment to make those decisions that will shape your future: DIRECTION
- Operational strategy
- Make the decisions that have the highest probability to realise value: THE NEXT STEP
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Core questions to start creating direction
- Why are you in the situation you are in?
- In what direction do you want to evolve?
- How do you see the future for your business and your company?
- How can you use our scarce resources for the best future?
- What is the next (correct) step that you should take now?
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Value Strategies
Directions to go, who create value for all, are nuanced.
Operational excellence
- Provide services
- In search of risk reduction, leading towards the substrategy 'The efficiency leader'
- Mastering emotional evaluation, leading towards the substrategy 'The customer leader'
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Customer intimacy
- Empathic (emotional) evaluation, leading towards the substrategy 'The client expert'
- Mastering emotional evaluation
- Attention to greater interests, leadfing towards the substrategy 'The authority'
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Product leadership
- Empathic (emotional) evaluation, leading towards the substrategy 'The ecosystem builder'
- Attention to greater interests, leading towards the substrategy 'The serial disruptor'
- Provide better services
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Deeper dive into the Why?
The goal of Corporate futuring is value realisation by emerging results
The one thing your (operational) strategy has to deliver is value. But, as you may have experienced, value realisation isn't a walk in the park. It is about connecting all the dots.
Value creation leads to the emergence of results. However, these results are not immediate. They only manifest when multiple elements within the organisation are connected and guided by your vision, strategy, tactics, and mission, all within the framework of Long-term thinking, Ethical decision-making, and Operational strategy.
The Experiential Growth Method® defines these 'vertical related' action fields as part of the implementation (the next step) of your Corporate futuring.
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- Reputation
- Operational strategy (strategic doing)
- Ethical decision making
- Long term thinking
- Culture
- Business model
- Organisational structure
- Appreciation
- Profit
- Financial manegement
- Performance
- Supporting
- Revenue
- Commercial management
- Operational management
- Steering
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Deeper dive into the How?
The dynamics of Corporate futuring comes from strategic thinking and doing
Your strategic cycle (vision, strategy, tactics, mission) mitigates the outside and inside forces of your enterprise and unites them for value realisation.
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How to succeed
As human beings
As human beings, we all need three things to succeed.
- First of all, enough food and shelter
- Secondly, a mate to reproduce
- Thirdly, information about the world surrounding us.
We all need this information to move towards enough resources, select the right fellow humans and create our habits and processes to be able to develop in our environment.
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As an enterprise
This applies to your enterprise in the very same way:
So, the first question we can ask ourselves concerns our resources.
- Why is there an opportunity to invent / advance / grow now?
- And what patterns arise from the interests our business has?
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The second one is about evaluating our surroundings.
- How / with whom will we make this opportunity work?
- And what principles do we organise our enterprise from, startign with our company's values?
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The third one concerns information.
- What drives the use of our value proposition?
- And what are the human-based processes we create from the goals our enterprise wants to realise?
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Some iconic examples
Computer
- Why became the computer industry possible?
- The silicon transistor.
- How was this opportunity reformed?
- Memory storage, first magnetic tape, later solid-state.
- What made the computer industry big?
- Software.
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Logistic chain
- Why became the logistic chain possible?
- The platform economy.
- How was this opportunity reformed?
- www - ai - 5G.
- What made the logistic chain big?
- Need for predictable, transparent supply chains.
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Deeper dive into the What?
The enterprise elements of the Corporate futuring framework
The Experiential Growth Method®, defines all these action fields as part of Corporate futuring. Their 'horizontal' relationships provide the processes in your organisatition that create a natural (corporate culture) or a wanted strategy.
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- Outer focus
- Operational strategy (strategic doing)
- Business model
- Financial management
- Commercial management
- Other focus
- Ethical decision making
- Organisational structure
- Performance
- Operational management
- Inner focus
- Long term thinking
- Appreciation
- Supporting
- Steering
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Your STRATEGY, consists of your vision, strategy, tactics and your mission
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Elements of your vision you can explore
Customer strategy: value proposition
- How do you turn the world upside down?
- What will your customer really miss if he does NOT purchase your product or service?
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Positioning strategy: market position
- How much are we
- Task drive ← vs.→ Market driven
- Product driven ← vs. → Capacity driven
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Elements of (value) strategy you can explore
Steering concepts
- Capital
- Resources
- Capabilities
- People
- Competencies
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Context strategy: your relational position
- ESG
- Environmental
- Social
- Governance
- STEEPLE
- Social
- Technological
- Economic
- Environmental
- Political
- Legal
- Ethical
- Client experiences
- Competition analysis
- Employee experiences
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Elements of your tactics you can explore
Business model strategy
- Building on market context (see vision & strategy)
- Business model → Value realisation
- Value proposition
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Elements of your mission you can explore
Scenarios
From your big dream via feasible scenarios to concrete goals.
This is the moment where the difference between development (design thinking) and execution becomes relevant.
- Development is concerned with exploring the “unknown unknowns” through possible futures (from incremental to disruptive)
- Scenarios and business dynamics modeling translate these insights into an executable plan (now known unknowns)
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