Encourage cross-border, multi-dimensional thinking in contexts, in complex interrelationships, in cause-effect relationships, in contradictions and in paradoxes in your company. Try to integrate topics with a medium-term impact horizon into the operational business. Set up these dialogues in a connectable communication process in which tendencies linked to content are captured, limits of one’s own impact are questioned, new things are introduced into the company’s development and the path is continuously reviewed and adjusted.
The exchange of experts from different disciplines on future topics (strategic conversation) enables the linking of individual findings and can lead to a coherent mindset of descriptors for the future, which also includes possible disruptive events, so-called wild cards. Such wild cards can be, for example, technological leaps, government (de-) regulations, terrorist attacks or epidemics. The basic idea here is that intellectual capital increases when it is shared, since important new knowledge is formed precisely at the interfaces between instances, i.e. in cross-border relationships between experts, teams and organisations. The interfaces can be, for example, borders between departments, company borders, sector borders or regional borders.
Discuss alternative directions of development in your team, identify strategic options for action and assess the consequences of possible actions. An analysis-based “systematic look into the future” has a high utility value. Describe the “future spaces” with the probable, consistent manifestations of the main influencing factors and trends and possibilities in scenarios. In this way, you gain vivid and coherent contexts for suitable strategies, for the identification of new markets and new scope, and for the directed, creative development of future products and services.
The constructive exchange of experience between experts from different fields and ideally also from different sectors on future topics can also pave the way for interesting research, production and marketing cooperations for the benefit of all involved. Therefore, consciously include selected customers and suppliers and even industry outsiders in your strategic dialogues. Foresight initiatives can open doors to attractive business networks.
Make sure that the results you arrive at in your foresight dialogue are incorporated into your business models and strategy development. This derivation can be well supported by a design thinking process.