Foresight
No one can foresee the future, but experience has shown that the most successful companies, organizations and executives, are those who deal a lot with understanding the future and preparing for it in an intelligent way. That is the source and secret of their success.
Understanding the picture of the future, as a partner to a negotiation will experience it in the next few years, will enable conducting the negotiation in an intelligent and insightful way.
The art of negotiation in the future will be influenced by the changes that are already taking place in the supertrends – trust, interpersonal communication, fake information, creativity and agreeableness.
Future thinking is an introductory process in which the future picture of the negotiation partner is deeply understood, what the super trends are, the driving forces relevant to the spheres of content of the negotiation and what will affect them, in order to create a strategy for negotiating in a way that will be appropriate and effective for years to come.
Modern global trends affect the strategic design and planning of companies and organizations, but many research teams focus on the present and the past without relating to critical changes expected in the future. In order to understand the future, one must develop futuristic strategic vision which identifies and foresees trends and updates methodology.
Several years ago, the world saw how the giant company, Blockbuster, with its tens of thousands of employees and revenues in the billions, collapsed and was replaced almost instantly by Instagram, a tiny company with less than a hundred employees that grew within a short time to revenues in the billions.
The Magnitude of the Challenge The future is changing faster than ever and producing changes that bring exceptional opportunities with risks that one must prepare for. The problem about understanding the future is even greater in the 21st century in view of the rate of change and the quick advancement of technology which we are experiencing, the quickest in history.
The quantity of additional information in the world doubles itself faster than ever before. A student who begins his higher education will experience the doubling of the quantity of information by the end of his studies. If it once took an average of twenty years to start a company worth a billion dollars, a unicorn, it now can take less than one year.
The ability to transform different traditional worlds of content to the digital worlds is changing future development and causing rapid pivotal changes in entire industries.
For example, in the music industry, the transition from tangible records to digital files required the creation of new pricing models and impacted the possibilities for personalization. A company like Spotify is rapidly changing the field unrecognizably.
An Exponential World
3D printing has existed for many years but it did not draw much attention because it was advancing at a slow, linear rate which was almost imperceptible. In the last few years, however, it began to develop exponentially and transformed the future of the entire industry within seven year, especially since the price of printing dropped from $40,000 to $100.
This is why successful companies, organizations and executives, deal a lot with understanding the future. Otherwise, the risks are greater than ever.
How is it done? What is foresight? A major tool for handling the challenges specified is foresight which, in a nutshell, is the ability to recognize supertrends and driving forces that already exist, and understanding them at a very early stage, which enables designing the future and taking advantage of the new opportunities.
This was defined well by Joanne Martin and Lisa Irvin, who said that it was the best way to fully understand the forces shaping the future in the long term, which should be considered in determining policy, planning and decision making.
A supertrend is not an understanding of what the next model of development in a certain technology will look like. That is something that is already done and is not the focus of foresight. A supertrend is a phenomenon that will transform several fields and sectors, and create a new future that will have an effect in five or ten years. After understanding the supertrends that will influence the relevant future, and understanding what the possible future scenarios might be due to these changes, a reverse process of inference has been done, from the future to the present, about the implications and the necesssary actions to be actioned and considered tomorrow morning.
The ability of companies to succeed in moving from survival mode and the next quarterly report to a sustainable mode that promises the success of the company for many years, is in adopting processes of foresight that are integrated and become one of the company’s principal abilities.
Shakla & Tariya has had a great deal of successful experience in assisting companies in these processes of foresight.