Key Notes on Strategizing for the Future

Strategizing for the future includes a series of efforts designed to handle the unpredictability and consequences of future events that result in the changes in where, when, and how work is done and who does the job or what the job is. These transitions can be triggered by an organisation or external influences such as rising technologies, market movements, and demographic shifts. These developments can sometimes pose existential challenges to a company’s supply chain, workforce, operations, or business strategy. A future work plan is a live document, and building one is an iterative process because new trends are compelling firms to adapt more often than ever.

The Future Strategy Meaning 

The company should go through a full process to build a vision and plan for strategizing for the future. 

There are three phases to this procedure, each with multiple steps.

Phase 1: Trends Analysis

The scope, comprehension, and prioritisation of significant trends and possible disruptions are all part of the first phase.

Identify Trends

Two methods to this might influence your business or provide future opportunities:

• External (external experts, news items, industry-specific trend reports, and search engine alerts) and internal sources should be used to gather trends (e.g., progressive business leaders, board and executive meeting minutes, employee and customer surveys, and talent analytics).
• Create trends from a multistep process. Imagine a possible future or the goal and work backwards to what needs to happen for that future to occur. A premortem, “science fiction writing,” examining competitors’ behaviour, and cross-industry analogies are all methods for imagining a possible future.

Interpret Trends

To comprehend the significance and ramifications of the discovered patterns, you can utilise one or both of the following points of view:

• Trends uncertainty is the process of evaluating trends on a scale of low to high uncertainty. Trends that are already occurring, predictable trends, unexpected trends, and transformational trends are the four groups along that continuum. This will aid you in comprehending the ramifications of these trends for your company’s objectives. You may determine the importance of trends by comparing the level of uncertainty to the time horizon your company considers when preparing for the future of work.
• The impact of external elements such as technical, political, economic, cultural or social, ethical or trust, regulatory or legal, and environmental factors on trends (TPESTRE or tapestry analysis or pestle analysis) is assessed. This will assist you in determining which trends have the largest influence on your company. You may learn more about the significance of each trend by identifying organisational characteristics that will accelerate or limit its influence.

Prioritise Trends

The next stage is to rank those trends that have the most potential for impact or competitive advantage. Two organisations provide good examples of how to achieve this:

• Longevity, alignment with workers and/or talent pool, and opportunity are the three factors used by NASA to narrow down the list of trends and shape the organisation’s future work vision. After filtering the trends, NASA organises them into end-state or theme-based goals to allow for a range of approaches to accomplishing each goal.
• An impact screen (evaluating the link between the trend and the company’s core business and skills) and an opportunity screen are part of John Deere’s megatrend evaluation filters (ranking megatrends and determining those fit for focused resource and time investment). These screens aid in the filtering and prioritisation of future job trends.

Phase 2: Scenario Creation

The second step is an adaptive strategy for forecasting and evaluating future business situations based on priority job patterns.

Develop Future Scenarios for Strategizing for the Future

Identify important uncertainties that might lead to a variety of future outcomes for your priority trends. Then, to generate future scenarios, mix a wide range of possible outcomes.

Once the scenarios are created, think about the business consequences of each one and utilise storytelling strategies to create simple, approachable stories that show the impact. Finally, evaluate the quality of the situations you’ve created.

Test Scenarios

Determine which events must or must not occur for each scenario to play out. This will allow you to plot an event route from the present state to future situations and track if the future is developing to favour one possibility over another. You may then select the scenarios with the highest degree of disruption and possibility of occurrence by assessing the likelihood of various events.

Phase 3: Strategizing for the Future with Planning

The third step is creating a roadmap or strategic plan for identifying, implementing and monitoring future work activities. The strategic strategy should also be able to adjust to changing trends.

Identify Initiatives

To find gaps in your present and future objectives, do a gap analysis of your existing company strategy and future scenarios according to their importance. Using this research, choose the most relevant future work projects to fill in the gaps and design your company’s future based on the highest-priority scenario.

Design Programs

Break down your future work efforts into programmes with precise goals and timetables, then allocate teams depending on the skills needed. Determine the resources needed to properly implement each programme and deliver the strategic plan.

Measure Progress

Select monitoring tools and metrics to measure and course-correct your organisation’s progress on future work projects. This stage also entails identifying and tracking trends that may have an impact on future situations and need a reassessment of your actions.

Conclusion

The most successful method to prepare for and shape the future of work is an organisation-wide, unified future of work plan. It may provide you with a competitive advantage in your industry and labour market, as well as uncover new ideas, speed up action during times of upheaval, and boost employer branding and employee engagement. By establishing shared ownership and responsibility for a single purpose, a unified strategy also provides a core framework for separate business divisions.

HR leaders must lead the effort to build a centralised future of work strategy as more firms begin to engage in planning for the future of work. In an era of constant upheaval and unpredictability, having a solid strategic strategy can help firms stay competitive.