Profound transformation will not be brought about by sticking to our existing ideas and priorities

Why do we need to transform our mindset to stay ahead of our competition?

Over the next decade, organisations need to unlock change in a way – and at a rate – that has so far eluded us. With accelerating change being the only constant, industries like healthcare, energy and financial services will be unrecognizable by 2030.

A big component of this paradigm shift will be caused by innovations in what we call ‘digital’. However, there are many social trends, political changes, technologies, innovations, and economic changes that are silently transforming industries and the way we interact with the world.

The accelerating change of the world will bring forward massive organisations that can leverage the new trends and technologies to meet customer demands using new business models and service offerings. On the contrary, the gap with losing businesses will become larger as most organisations are unable to adapt to the accelerating changes in their industry.

For organisations to win the battle and stay relevant, it is not enough to know what needs to be done in the near future. We need to accept that radical shifts in all parts of society and business will be required. To prepare ourselves for this future world and make sure we create value for it, we need a mindset shift that allows us to look ahead and anticipate on emerging change before your competition.

What is blocking us from rapid transformation?

Changing the mindset of an organisation’s mindset is unfortunately easier said then done. It requires change agents within the organisation to persuade stakeholders and solve the main blockers of organisational transformation. The main blockers of transformation are:

1. Short-termism

Short-termism recently headlined BBC as one of the greatest threats of our civilization. Humans tend to overestimate what happens in the near future, and underestimate change that happens in the long-term, which is what keeps organisations from seeing the importance of acting now on change and innovation in the future. Organisations that exhibit large amounts of short-termism are less likely to make choices that benefit the world and their organisation in the long run. It blocks transformation because it exhibits us to see the long-term change impacting our industry and market.

2. Opportunity alignment and ambition

In addition to the constraints that short-termism imposes, our organisational mindset is often not sufficiently aligned on the need for action. This means your organisation spends little time empowering you to come up with opportunities for innovation. It also means that there is no clear alignment on what validated opportunities are most interesting to grasp, and it is unclear what the ambition of the organisation is with emerging future opportunities.

3. Transition costs

Transparency is needed about the costs of transition and change or its likely effects on a range of different stakeholders. Most organisation see the reason for some change; however, costs are holding them back from actively investing in long term innovation.

Transition costs of the transformations we seek will be significant – enormous in fact – as will the costs of inaction. Acknowledging the true transition costs is an essential part of planning how your organisation can future-proof its business. The risk of every long-term opportunity your organisation aims to grap needs to be minimized to reduce the risk of investing in innovation that does not contribute to your company’s long term goal.

How you can Future-Proof your Organisation

To be better prepared at how your organisation can facilitate the growing change in the world, it is important not to withstand change: it is about embracing it. To become future-proof, you need the ability to anticipate future change by spotting opportunities the moment they arise and empowering your organisation to grasp them.

When businesses recognize that they are part of a wider system, their understanding of change shifts from making themselves robust and able to resist change, towards a mindset of adaptation and evolution that is required if they are to continue to exist as employers, as value-generators for shareholders, and as members of communities around the world.

As a change agent within your organisation, you need to make your organisation aware of the wider system in which it operates and the changes that are impacting it. In addition, you need to build the organisational capabilities to understand changes and be able to spot the emerging opportunities that your organisation can use to future-proof its business.

Upskilling people to become future-proof change agents in organisations

In times of increasingly rapid change, growing complexity, and critical uncertainty, a responsible way of doing business responsible requires preparing for the unexpected. Upskilling people with the skills to anticipate on the unexpected and future change is essential to ensure long-term organisational.

The goal of this course is to teach you to become ‘Futures Literate’, meaning you are ready to become a change agent that can enhance your organisation’s ability to spot emerging opportunities, prepare for change, and become the catalyst that will ensure a future-proof organisation.

This course will equip you to:

• enhance the speed at which you perceive change and can make choices

• be better at managing risk and uncertainty for your organisation

• integrate opportunity management within your organisation

• build a choice menu of options that your organisation can pursue to increase its long term success

• detect change, novelty, shocks, trends and surprises in your industry

• spot emerging opportunities that your organisation can leverage to stay ahead of its competition

Foresight, Futures Studies, Strategic Foresight, Scenario Planning or Speculative Design. All of them are fields related to planning for the future and thinking in a structured way about what lies ahead. This course aims to provide an insight into the essence of these fields by teaching you the basics of using the future as a strategic tool.