With 5A ready for the Future
My Ultimate Guide for Futures Research
Hey there,
Around 2007, when I was studying Business Administration and still had a simple Nokia, BlackBerry phones with their QWERTY keyboards were THE trend.
Business people could answer their emails on the go and became addicted to their phones and the associated status. This led to a fitting nickname:
CrackBerry
The rise of the BlackBerry was as stormy as its fall. The company behind the phone, Canadian Research in Motion (RIM), reacted mockingly to Apple's announcement of the iPhone in 2007.
RIM underestimated the appeal of the touchscreen, apps, and app store. The company stubbornly continued to focus on their keyboard phones and the business market.
I think that with good future research, RIM could have better foreseen the threat from Apple and could have anticipated it.1
In this newsletter, I'll share how I conduct future research using my 5A model.
Maybe too late for RIM and their BlackBerry, but useful for you!
Enjoy reading,
Peter
PS. Or, if you prefer watching, check out this video:
The 5A’s of Futures Research
How do I conduct futures research? My work as a futurist mainly consists of giving lectures, facilitating workshops, and advising organizations on innovations and strategy. But how does such a future research project run from start to finish?
In my lectures, workshops, and advisory work, I use the following model:
Anticipate: Determining the scope and timeframe. How far do we want to look ahead, and which elements do we include?
Analyze: Analyzing trends and signals, for example in my lecture trends 2040.
Articulate: Developing future scenarios, for example, through scenario planning.
Assess: Adjusting plans and strategies based on insights from the previous steps and conducting small experiments.
Act: Continuously monitoring and adjusting the course. Foresight activities are never finished.
In this edition, I'll tell you more about the 5As.
1. Anticipate
I start all my assignments with Anticipate. Whether it's a lecture, workshop, a class at school, or a consulting job.
These are questions I always ask:
What is the time horizon? Is it 5 years, 10 years, or even longer?
How broadly do we want to research? Into the future of a product, a team, a company, a municipality, an industry, or the world?
What do we include? Only technological changes, or also elements such as demographics, economy, competitors, etc.2
Who do we involve? Senior management, a few colleagues, important customers and/or other stakeholders?
Another important topic I discuss in this step is what happens when the future research is completed.
Has the organization already thought about what they want to do with the results? Will there also be money and time available to convert the insights into strategic plans, actions, or innovations?
This seems logical, but it doesn't always happen.
2 Analyze
During Exploring, we map trends, developments, and weak signals. We do this using the future triangle.
In a previous edition of this newsletter, I wrote more about this step:
3 Articulate
In Articulate, we convert the insights from the previous step of Analyze into scenarios.
The purpose of the scenarios is not to predict the future, but to broaden thinking, get ideas for innovations, and start conversations.
I've written more about this step here:
4 Assess
In Assess, we translate the insights from the third step into strategic plans, actions and/or innovations.
If you skip this step, you run the risk that the future research remains just a fun creative exercise. While for me, the added value really lies in this conversion from the future to the here and now.
The most commonly used methods in this step are:
Backcasting
Wind tunnel
In both methods, you need scenarios from the previous step of Imagining.
Backcasting
With backcasting, we discuss what needs to happen to achieve a desired future.
A starting question is, for example:
Imagine, it's 2040 and our desired scenario has become reality. What are important events that have led to the desired outcome?
Another variant of this starting question is: it's 2040 and one of the undesired scenarios has come true. What have been important turning points that led to this? What could we do to counter or positively influence those moments?
Wind tunnel
Wind tunnel is a translation of a well-known method from industrial design: the wind tunnel test. In a closed space, wind blows on airplanes, race cars, and even cyclists to calculate air flows, air resistance, and aerodynamics.³
You can do the same with a company's strategy. You look at how the strategy or a plan scores in one or more scenarios.
A strategy is robust if it works in (almost) all scenarios.
A strategy is fragile if it doesn't work in (almost) all scenarios.
A strategy is a big gamble if it doesn't work in the majority of scenarios, but for example, extremely well in a specific scenario.
Based on the insights from the wind tunnel, you can then determine to adjust the strategy.
5 Act
Future research is never finished. Because you can go through the entire process, but then you are already at least a few weeks or months further.
The best practice with this work is therefore to periodically go through the entire process or parts of it.
For example, you can also revisit the trends and developments from the second step of Exploring after a year. Are there things that are suddenly going faster or that are now emerging? Should we then recalibrate our scenarios?
VUCA time
These times with continuous changes are also called VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. That asks quite a lot from organizations and their leadership.
For example, I read an interview with John Pettigrew, the CEO of National Grid, the British power grid operator. He puts it nicely:
Change and disruption are the order of the day. Leaders must therefore be able to switch quickly, adjust their plans, and be agile.
In short, you must be continuously alert and flexible. The 5A model helps to see changes, assess them, and anticipate them.
Example
How do you put the 5A model into practice?
In this article, I have described all the steps, methods, and results:
Deep Dive
Articles, books, podcasts, videos, documentaries, and more on this theme.
1. READ / Interesting article in the New Yorker about why thinking about the future is so difficult: 'Why Are We Tormented by the Future?'
2. DO / In my work as a future researcher, personal knowledge management (PKM) is essential. I want to be able to quickly store and retrieve all relevant information about trends, clients, and methods.
That's why I'm going to the PKM Summit on March 14 and 15 at Seats2Meet in Utrecht to gain new insights, learn great tips, and meet the friendly community again.
3. WATCH / The rise and fall of the BlackBerry phone is nicely filmed in BlackBerry (7.3 on IMDb).
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By the way, the company RIM never technically went bankrupt. They no longer make phones, but the company now develops operating systems for cars and is active in cybersecurity.
Useful tools for this are models such as DESTEP (demographic, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological and political-legal) and Porter's Five Forces (new entrants, suppliers, customers, substitutes and industry rivalry).