A New Way to Plan for the Future

Abstract

Abstr actBuilding on state-of-the-art techniques for forecasting future developments in technology, business, economics, and other areas of human endeavor, we describe a novel methodology for adaptive contingency planning at the strategic initiative level. Complementing normal business planning that uses a schedule based on predictions tied to dates in the future, we use a new kind of early warning signal called a signpost to trigger the execution of corresponding new recommended actions. Intr oductionA signpost is a recognizable potential future event that signals a change of importance to an enterprise. The specificity of signpost events makes it possible to generate contingency plans and to perform costbenefit analyses so that the contingency plans are comparable with and prioritizable against current business plans, allowing for a smooth integration of new plans with old. The result is a set of missions or initiatives tied to the occurrence of recognizable events rather than a rigid time schedule. This restructuring of strategy allows for better timing of actions to market conditions, enables advance planning for disruptive change, provides a systematic way to identify and monitor new business opportunities, and turns threats into opportunities.The traditional technology roadmap approach to planning consists of extrapolating current trends and exploring the likelihood of meeting current challenges. This approach is appropriate for business planning for a three to five year horizon, within which the plans are based on the expected course of technology progress. To accommodate a longer time horizon or to better prepare for the unexpected, we use the signpost approach, which includes a brainstorming technique focused on the deep future, followed by backcasting toward the near future but outside the box of extrapolation of current trends. Concurrent with backcasting, we systematically explore current technology landscapes, using information mining techniques on data sources including patents, publications, and other unstructured information sources. Coordinated interaction between scenario based backcasting and technology landscapes generates candidate potential future signpost events. In this paper we focus on the idea generation, evaluation, and analysis techniques that lead to the identification of signposts.

The current state of scenario development: an overview of techniques

“…IBM does not recommend that the client work to create the breakthroughs because they are so massive that even the most capable client would contribute little to their occurrence. What is more, breakthroughs are by definition unpredictable, particularly when they will occur, so that they recommend rather that the client monitor for the occurrence of the breakthrough and then deploy a contingent strategy during a subsequent window of opportunity for exploiting the capabilities of the breakthrough (see Strong, 2006). Future mapping .…”

The Forest Futures Horizon Scanning Project

“…Define milestones and interim objectives. Strong et al (2007) suggested that the key element for constructing the pathway back from the future involves the identification of signposts. They define a signpost as a "recognizable potential future event that signals a significant change."…”

Studying, Teaching and Applying Sustainability Visions Using Systems Modeling

“…Normative-based approaches, even those that do include a visioning process, such as backcast modeling [16,17], future mapping [18], horizon mission methodology [19], the impact of future technologies scenarios [20] and sociovision [21], do not explicitly model the future desirable state. Instead, sets of goals, moving targets or indicators representing the vision are generally used to direct and assess scenario pathways.…”