Leading Your Organization into the Future

As you lead your organization into the future, wouldn't you like to know where you're going?

You realize it is a mistake to assume the future will look like the past. You don't want to be caught unprepared. You can forecast and predict, but you know that the future is uncertain. The current business environment is punctuated by rapid changes, and linear planning can only take you so far. You need KHA's business planning consulting services to help lead your organization into the future.

Leading your organization into the future requires scenario planning consulting services, because scenario planning is one of the first stages of strategic planning. This kind of strategic thinking and discussion is essential for the growth of your organization and its development as the business world rapidly changes. Creating different scenarios for your organization's future can help prepare you for any possibility in our changing world. Instead of planning for a single future, Ken Hubbell and Associates can help you plan for multiple futures through business planning consulting services.

This process will include:

• Developing a Roadmap (PDF) of Possible Futures
• Visual and Graphic Facilitation
• Answering Questions and Telling Stories
• Testing Current Strategies

What would it take?

Developing a Roadmap of Possible Futures

Developing stories about different futures can catalyze new levels of strategic thought and conversation within your organization. Mapping the Futures is an "outside-in" process, usually beginning with research about national or global events (social, environmental, economic, technologic, and political trends) that are naturally predetermined to continue into the future. The process enables you to identify the key uncertainties that your firm and other stakeholders will confront in the future. After creating stories about the future, your team must deeply examine the implications for your organization. Recognizing the implications of each story allows you to prepare for all possible futures. Rehearsing multiple futures makes it possible for you to respond quickly and strategically to any challenge.

The process is highly creative, informal, and intuitive. It works best when done by a group with broadly diverse experiences and points of view. The secret ingredients are the hidden ideas and perceptions about opportunities, strategies, or dangers held within people. This experience brings these ideas to the surface creating an evolving learning environment and a unique planning experience.

Answering Questions and Telling Stories

Story telling is a crucial part of this strategic process. Developing a set of stories about the future requires deep hindsight about the past and evokes great foresight about the future. At Ken Hubbell and Associates, we use a photographic term "Depth of Field" to describe this process. "Depth of field" describes a "plane of critical focus," which can start with extreme close-up focus and extend deep into the distance. Our approach to strategic and creative thinking for organizations generates new clarity about the present circumstances and events and the deeper patterns and unseen architecture of the distant future.

Your stories will answer your organization's big questions. The ones you pose before making major decisions with long-term implications-Questions about new products, markets, or investments; questions about the future of your organization.

Testing Current Strategies

Once your group has developed a set of structurally distinct futures, our team of consultants will help you test your current strategies against each of the possible futures. At this stage, your group imagines how stakeholders, customers, and suppliers would react to these futures and assesses the implications for your products, programs or services. This illuminates bottlenecks, risks, and opportunities.

Mapping the Futures makes firms and organizations more aware of the impending changes in the business environment. Participants identify indicators or "signposts" of change for each story, so leadership teams can monitor the evolving future and take strategic action before the full impact of critical trends is felt in the bottom line.

What Would It Take?

While initial sessions can be short, most groups need a few sequential, off-site, working retreats to complete a full set of customized stories about the future and to re-tool their strategies. In addition to designing and facilitating the customized planning and learning experiences, Ken Hubbell and Associates will train a core group of strategic leaders to carry on the process of envisioning and responding to different-but all possible-futures.

Framing your future with KHA's Scenario Planning Consulting can help your organization clarify some of your most challenging questions and can also help re-define your vision, mission, and goals. As scenario planning is only one of the first steps in strategic thinking, our firm offers more extensive business and organizational planning. When you are confronted with challenging business problems, Ken Hubbell and Associates consulting services offers a comprehensive suite of services to assess and retool your organization. Our associates use a reinforcing cycle of exploration, learning, design, and action in a creative environment to help groups shape successful change strategies through strategic business planning.

Also ask about our business development consultants.

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