Futures Coaching

The Philippines : hidden potential about to be discovered

The Philippines is one of the most western of Asian countries. A huge nation of English speaking Christians who adore America, Goldman Sachs predict phenomenal economic growth in the decades ahead.

Find out more about the potential of this 'Pearl of the Orient Sea' - and what is holding it back - by clicking onto my Slideshare presentation here.

 

Where to grow business in 2012...and beyond

In the first of the "Growth Stories" series of posts, I've focused on sure-fire socio-demographic trends.

Find out the formula for GDP growth and the 15 countries set for explosive increases in consumer spending. Investments, roll-out strategies and manpower allocations need to follow the money. You'll find out where to invest resources by following this link.

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Growth Stories

It's official: 2012 will be worse than 2011. Well, that's what most commentators, journalists, Heads of State and stock market pundits seem to be saying. The consensus is in one direction: caution, safety, cost-cutting and NO BIG DECISIONS.

However. 

There is lots of positive news out there. You just have to be willing to go beyond the consensus, the conventional and the groupstink (sic). 

So I've decided to dedicate a series of blogs to just that. "Growth Stories" will be vignettes aimed at revealing the forces that will drive market growth in 2012...and beyond. All will be positive and aimed at helping you building business fortunes and brand profiles.

And to avoid information overload, each trend analysis will take just 5 minutes to read. To ensure you catch each of our Growth Stories, sign-up for a weekly newsletter (top right of this blog). You can unsubscribe anytime you wish. 

It would be wrong to suggest that 2012 will be easy. It will be a time of high uncertainty, 'black swan' surprises and negativity. But whilst everyone else is looking the other way, this will be just the time to identify the market opportunities. Growth Stories will, I hope, help you do just that.

Snake oil salesman or valuable guide?

A dear friend told it to me straight: no one believes experts are able to anticipate the future because the recent past has proven it. No one saw the Credit Crunch coming; the Arab Spring caught everyone by surprise; the Japanese tsunami was a true black swan.

No quite true of course. Bob Prechter, Nouriel Roubini, Richard Maybury, Dr Doom himself (Marc Faber) and others foresaw the economic crash; a computer at the University of Illinois predicted the Egyptian revolt; seismologists knew it was only a matter of time for Japan to be hit by a 'big one'.

However, I had to conceed that futurologists are not good at foreseeing 'out of the blue' events, any more than the average businessman. So what value can we offer? Here's a starter:

* a good sense of the coming agenda

* an evaluation for plausible outcomes

* a grip on the evolving dynamics shaping the world

* a wake-up call for the majority who see tomorrow as a repeat of today

 

And the consequences for businesses:

* taking smarter decisions in the evolving trading environment

* helping businesses and brands prepare for what's coming

* future-proofing existing offers

* stress testing strategies under different scenarios

* intercepting the future with new offers and services

* capturing leading edge targets

* demonstrating thought leadership

* challenging mono-cultures within companies by letting in different world views

* being an effective challenger brand by getting ahead of the curve

* making contingency plans for downturns, PR challenges, disruptive change

* providing a way to discuss fundamental business issues in a neutral way

Ultimately, it's about thinking more broadly about the changing world, lifting ideas above the day-to-day and moving the debate beyond stale, culture bound thinking. Looking to the future, forces management teams to examine their mental maps and ensures better decision taking.

So, no snake oil here. Just two challenges to management: 1) have you got the time, the energy, the courage and the intellectual horse-power to go beyond tactical delivery and build in business longevity?; 2) can you afford to ignore tomorrow's customer?

 

 

 

Asia 5

Futures Coaching has launched a new initiative called Asia 5.

Much is being written about the Asian Century but most business people have little time to read these days. Asia 5 aims to summarise relevant business topics in just 5 minutes. The short presentations will be:

- visual
- fun
- deal with business fundamentals
- concise

So, if you need to have a background view on Asian developments, subscribe for a weekly update. Just add your email where indicated. You can unsubscribe at any time. Happy reading.

 

Find the Future in Four Easy Steps

Your company might have reached the conclusion that future-proofing is vital but still not be able to do much about it. Intercepting the future is difficult, no doubt about it. Here are some common concerns:

• Finding the future takes too long and costs too much 
• Trends companies are all a bit flaky
• The futuring tool set seems shaky
• No one seems to do 'future-back' successfully ie. go from future foresights to today's decisions and strategies
• Getting internal buy-in is a struggle

I've been fighting with these issues for the last 13 years and here's some of the lessons I've learnt: 

• Most trends companies are staffed by researchers or journalist: few of whom know the world of business well
• Some tools are indeed inefficient (horizon scanning) or impractical (eg. scenarios)
• Trends are a raw material input to future planning, not an end in themselves
• The most important question in futurology is 'so what?'. Foresight is only important if it is relevant and leads to implications for a brand, a business or a sector
• It's important to take a holistic approach: too many trends companies are focused on one area, technology, say, or socio-cultural trends
• Finally, it's vital to get input from a wide variety of sources: in-house research and external datamining; internal experts and outside gurus.

Using these and other insights, I've been able to refine a methodology which successfully builds the best assumption base about the future - for any given sector. The approach is called 'Horizon Opportunities' and has been tried and tested now over an eight year period, amongst numerous clients, in a variety of sectors and geographies. 

Horizon Opportunities is simple to manage, rapid and extremely good value for money. It involves just 4 steps, each step building sequentially upon the previous one: 

1. Datamining
2. Expert interviews
3. Interactive workshops
4. Execution 

A typical timeframe for this work is 2-3 months; a typical cost £30,000. I've also worked up a 'lite' version, which starts at £10,000 and gives top-line results.

Now, finding the future need not involve personal nor professional risks. Contact me for a no obligation chat: chris@futurescoaching.com 

Four Consumer End Games for 2012

2012 will be make or break for many businesses. Has business survival ever been more dependent on knowing how consumers will react in the future? 

I've been working on the four key strategies - or End Games - which consumers will deploy in 2012. Consumer 'End Games' come to the fore in times of uncertainty, where having a survival strategy matters.

The top line analysis will take about 5 minutes to read. Here

Consumer centric is dead : The next paradigm in consumer health

There is a revolution going on in healthcare. Information rich patients are getting savvy, demanding treatments from their GP. Doctors are responding by prescribing to patient wishes. The consumer healthcare industry is focused on meeting the 'well-th' needs and wants of the public.

But this is NOT the revolution I'm referring to! The empowered consumer was yesterday's revolution. Tomorrow will be increasingly about CONSUMER ACCELERATED HEALTH.

Under out noses, consumers are reorganising and reprioritising what they do in their lives and what they want in their lives. What they want is more trust and transparency and what they do is more open and internet based. Meaning? Consumers are turning away from 'experts' and finding faith in 'others like them' on the internet.

Disintermediation is happening in most sectors – goodbye travel agencies, goodbye record labels... It's happening in healthcare too. This dynamic requires four pre-conditions and all are met in the health arena. People must want to be open and share information. They need to be driven to spend time and take action. There must be a ready and willing tribe to chat/exchange/advise. Finally there has to be an accessible place – the internet.

Rather than passively react to the healthcare industry, consumers are starting to participate, to collaborate, to join together. This is new. Rather than be at the centre of the healthcare system, surrounded by the experts, together they become proactive actors in true peer-to-peer fashion, pushing the so-called 'experts' to the periphery.

Of course, the future is already here for all to see.

Patients-Like-Me describe their online business as “patients helping patients live better everyday”. They have 80,000 people actively participating in 11 disease communities. Macmillan Cancer Support gets over 4 million unique visitors and hosts active forums and chats. In well-being, Mumsnet  and Nike Running have huge following communities - all real 'fans' and many participating and collaborating with each other.

http://www.patientslikeme.com/

http://www.macmillan.org.uk/ 

http://www.mumsnet.com/

http://nikerunning.nike.com

And whilst paradigm movement can already be seen, I've identified seven levers which will ensure that Consumer Accelerated Health has a growing and massive impact over the decade ahead.

Those impacts will be profound for the health industry – necessitating internal cultural change, increasing technological capabilities and launching radical new products and services.

Organisations wishing to keep ahead of the consumer curve have to invest NOW in the insights, ideas and implications of Consumer Accelerated Health – the central paradigm for the 2010s.

The Future of Everything

In my experience, companies look for the Future in the strangest of places.

- in the heads of their loyal consumers

- in the data of their trusted number crunchers

- in the imagination of their beloved mystical guru

- in the ego of their favourite trendscout

Unfortunately, all approaches fall victim to the 'garbage in, garbage out' maxim.

Meanwhile, there is a robust approach to anticipating the evolution in any sector. The Future of Everything presentation SLIDESHARE shows you how - and gives a worked example.

Have a quick peek. It just might save your budget - and your face.

Five myths about future forecasting

Like other professions (accounting, law)..., futurologists like to create a certain mystique about their science. And like other professions, lack of transparency can cost clients dear. At Futures Coaching, we try to be as see through and straight forward as possible. Part of our approach is to bust the myths of orthodox futuring and help our clients get to cut through analysis quickly and efficiently.

So let's explode five myths of futuring, here and now:

1. Future forecasting is complex and takes time. Well, actually, no. My friend Joop de Vries tells me that in the 1970s and 1980s, scenario analysis work used to take up to 2 years to complete! By which time, I suppose, the scenarios were already out of date and in need of updating.

My experience is that futuring does not have to take years, or even months, to complete. I've recently worked up mobility scenarios for the auto industry in a matter of weeks. In banking, the 10 year time horizon took rather little time to understand and project.

2. Trends are the output. Again, not true. For a client, a series of trends is a nice-to-know. The need- to-know is: 'what does this mean for my business/sector?' So, actually, trends should be an input, never an output.

3. What matters is what's breaking. Wrong, I'm afraid. Too often trendscouts make a big thing of the next thing. But for most businesses, most of the time, what is more important are the underlying structural trends that will continue to build into the future. Yes, everyone has heard about the ageing   society. But this trend will continue to impact massively going forward and so has to be on most businesses radar screen.

4. Innovation is a creative exercise. Yes and no. You certainly need free thinkers to come up with new offers. But, winners in the future will be those products and services linked to the powerful engine of drivers of consumer motivations. So, it's about both art and science.

5. Futuring is expensive. Naturally, many institutional agencies carry big overheads and so their consulting is priced sky high. So the issue is cost structure not futuring itself. Understanding the future of a particular industry or sector need not cost the earth if an agency is configured for the 21st century.

So, take a fresh look at the futuring industry - and perhaps that futures-facing study is actually within reach.