13 Strategic Thinking Questions to Imagine a Radically Different Future

Need to challenge your team to being imagining the future, realizing it may look hardly anything like today?

Originating in a long-term future visioning exercise we designed and facilitated for a client, we developed these questions to prompt a group’s thinking about dramatic future change. The point was to push them to consider the future as something other than a trend line based on yesterday and today.

Strategic Thinking Questions to Imagine a Radically Different Future

Once you provide hypotheses on what you suspect the future will be like in your market, these strategic thinking questions are productive to reinforce dramatic changes ahead.

Ask the team (whether individually or in small groups), what if our future were:

1. Seemingly magical?
2. Totally surprising and unexpected at every turn?
3. Unbelievably scary and threatening?
4. All about only addressing exceptions from what was expected?
5. Totally automated and run by robots?
6. Rapid fire?
7. Filled with data at every turn?
8. Devoid of personal, face-to-face communication?
9. Run by 125-year old people that haven't reached retirement age yet?
10. Run by 16-year-olds with 10x more intellectual horsepower, knowledge, experience, and energy than people five times their age?
11. Playing out fine with no need for human involvement?
12. Completely unpredictable?
13. Unlike ANYTHING we have known so far?

Coupled with other exercises to envision a radically different future, these strategic thinking questions, all rooted in projected trends, will help push the group to consider new perspectives you need to prepare to address. – Mike Brown

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