In today’s fast-changing world, it’s tough to stay on top of all the latest trends. There’s always something new vying for our attention, but how do we know which trends are actually worth our time and which are just hype?
When you see some new innovation, technology, or idea, how do you know whether it’s going to be the next big thing that’s going to change the world – or it’s just overblown hype that’s going to fall in a heap in the next few months (or maybe next few weeks), or somewhere in between?
Of course, the bad news is we don’t know for certain because we can’t predict exactly what’s going to come up in our future. The good news is there are some tools and techniques that you can use to assess the impact of an idea in the future and how plausible it is, and that will help you make better decisions now.
In my Future Scenarios program, this is exactly what we do. I work with leaders and their teams to assess what trends are coming up in the future and what impact it’s going to have. We do a big scan first and we identify lots and lots of trends. Then we assess them to see whether they’re possible, plausible, or probable for our future. And then we choose the ones that are going to have the biggest impact on that organisation or their industry. And finally, we track those changes so that you can keep an eye on them and they feed into your strategy and your day to day operations.
Let’s look specifically at that ‘assess’ stage. There are a number of tools we use to assess whether something is likely to have an impact in our future. And one of them is this very simple idea, but a very powerful idea, which is simply to ask,
“What problem does this solve?”
If you’re a client of mine, you’re probably sick of me always saying to you,
“What problem does it solve?”
“What goal does it help people achieve?”
But it’s really important, because if it doesn’t solve a real problem out there in the world, it’s less likely to have an impact in the future. It’s not 100% sure that it won’t. But if it does solve a problem, that means it’s more likely to have momentum behind it. People will invest in it. More people will be interested in it. It’s likely to grow faster.
In my Future Scenarios program, I work with leaders and their teams to help them assess trends and scenarios. I’m going to run a virtual masterclass soon, where I’ll take some of that program and give you three simple, practical, ideas you can use right now to prepare your people (and yourself!) for the future.
It’s free, public, and open to everybody, so please join me.
REGISTER FOR VIRTUAL MASTERCLASS
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