Our last article was about the Amazon Effect, how it has changed consumers, and argued that, to stay ahead of the next wave of change, leaders increasingly have two jobs:
Find ways to remove the unnecessary friction customers will increasingly refuse to tolerate.
Invest deeply in the things technology makes more valuable rather than less: knowledge, judgement, trust, experience, care, community, conversation and human connection.
A few people quite reasonably asked: How?
The good news is that future thinking doesn't need to involve gazing into a crystal ball. It merely needs discipline.
Here are six things you can start doing.
1. Follow
Pay attention beyond your own organisation and industry.
What are customers talking about? What technologies are emerging? What are universities researching? What is happening in adjacent industries? What behaviours are appearing at the edges?
We live in a world where most people and businesses like to share what they're up to, so use social media to your advantage and become better at noticing change before it becomes obvious.
2. Invest
Give future thinking some actual time.
Most organisations say they want to be innovative while their leaders spend almost every available hour dealing with today.
Give yourself and your team time to research customers, competitors, emerging technologies and broader social shifts. Look particularly for the gaps: needs that aren't being met and frustrations people have simply learned to tolerate.
3. Empathise
Trends only become useful when you understand what they mean for the people you serve.
Ask:
What behaviours are changing?
What are people finding easier?
What are they becoming less willing to put up with?
What new needs are emerging?
4. Analyse
Don't stop at “this trend is interesting”.
Ask what happens next.
What are the second and third-order effects? What disappears? What becomes easier? What becomes more valuable? What new expectations will this create?
Most importantly: How could we turn this into an opportunity?
This is where those two questions from last week become particularly useful: What friction could we remove? What human value should we increase?
5. Collaborate
Future thinking is an outside-in activity.
Talk to customers, suppliers, researchers and people in completely different industries. Invite people into the conversation who see the world differently to you. Have conversations with people from other countries and other cultures.
Your next opportunity may not come from someone who knows your business intimately. It could come from someone who knows something you don't.
6. Act
Finally, do something with what you learn.
You don't need to bet the company on a prediction. Instead, try running an experiment. It might be to test a new service with a small pilot group, remove one piece of customer friction and see what happens or to trial a different way of working for a month and measure the impact.
Sometimes we get stuck in analysis by paralysis, but research without action doesn't create advantage. The organisations that stay ahead build a repeatable way of turning insight into action.
Perhaps the question for your next leadership meeting isn't “What will the future look like?”
It's:
What are we noticing, what might it mean, and what are we going to do about it?