Future History

Setting your strategy for the future is always tricky, as of course, none of us really knows what’s going to happen.

Just look back 5, 10 or 20 years to see how far we’ve come. Who hasn’t said to themselves “if you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be [insert amazing thing we take for granted now], I’d have laughed at you!”

Often, it’s the simple conceptual ideas that seemed a bit too out of reach, or outside of the existing ways of thinking, which have had the most unbelievable impacts.

The idea of lots of pages of information that you can link up in whatever way you fancy and then follow them through. Who’d be interested in that?

Teeny-wee device that you flip open to talk to someone on the other side of the planet. Nah, fine for Star Trek but how could that apply to me?

Thinking like this prompted us to run strategy workshops by “jumping forward and looking back”. This is what we mean by “future history” – writing history that hasn’t happened yet.

Pick your crazy idea, and work out the steps that it took for that idea to become accepted. Just like the internet/world wide web. Just like the mobile phone.

It’s normally pretty difficult to get the average business exec gathering to think this way from cold, so what we do to prepare is look back in time the same distance – of 2, 5, 10, 20 or however many years. We write it up, and look at what basic stuff we did and used then, but laugh at now. We get people to shout out their own memories of the time, and the economic and social factors that were at play at the time. Building a picture.

Get people to recognise how far we’ve come, and they will will be more willing to think of how far we can go.

Then, let the brainstorming begin!

The ice-breaker, by the way, is usually to highlight what was at number one in the music charts way back then, or the year’s big blockbuster film.

This is a great, fun approach to strategy, that often brings out “the big, hairy, audacious ideas” that challenge your thinking and make you look at what you could, and should achieve with your business or organisation.