Futures Solutions

You may not be able to control the future, but your organization can prepare to manage its response to it. We can help you with this daunting challenge.

  • Our services are based on almost 50 years of experience and preparation.

  • They are designed to help you, as an individual prepare for the future.

  • A second set of services is designed to help your organization anticipate and benefit from the resilience you can build.

Obstacles and Challenges

The landscape is littered with fads and unproven methods of thinking about the future. Building a path through and around these is necessary.

  • What information and data do I need to track?
  • How do I make sense of it?
  • What kinds of decisions will they help me make?
  • Who on my team can lead this effort?
  • Will systematic analysis of the future benefit my business/agency/government department?
  • Which methods are available to us and which should I/we select?
  • Will the cost be worth it?

Understanding Futures Solutions

The path to the future for you and your organization? Seeing that is the first step, and we have a tool kit for you to use. This includes:

Basic Systems, Easy to Manage Systems:

  •  Early Warning Systems 
  • Operational early detection 
  • Strategic early detection 
  • Strategic foresight 

More Complex Systems

  • Foresight: Different, equally possible, feasible, desirable futures without regards to probability
  • Forecast: Determination of the most exact and probable future

Most Complex Methods

  • Causal Logic, for example, simulation.
  • Laws and Theories, e.g., S-curve analysis 
  • Fantasy and Story Teling
  • Methods of analyzing the presence of change, e.g., patent analysis
  • Methods of forming an opinion: e.g., expert panels
  • Intuitive logics,
  • Cross-Impact methods, using trend extrapolation.
  • Consistency based methods, using mathematical methods of enumeration.

Words of Warning

Using organized tools and methods to deal with the future offers you stronger positions than merely adopting today’s trends or believing in what is predicted as tomorrow’s new world.

In 1939 the most popular pavilion at the New York World’s Fair was the GM display. It featured self-driving cars, a trend that was sure to take over within a decade.

In 1957 my Junior Scholastic magazine to which we all had to subscribe predicted that self driving cars would be the norm by 1965.

On the other hand, during that time period there were predictions that polio would be a disease of the past. That turned out to be true.

NEXT:

If you would like to create systems to sense the future and prepare responses, contact us. Now is not too soon.

croxin@thefuturesgroupllc.com