Early in the marketing of electric vehicles, Pasqaule Romano, CEO of ChargePoint, discussed the future of electric cars at the time and why he expected the charging station model would diverge from the gas station model. Romano shared an important insight into the challenge of developing strategic thinking exercises to envision future strategy: "Until you drive an EV, you are colored by 135 years of going to the gas station. Under that scenario, you say 'Where is the new company that's doing EV charging on street corners or in my highway entrance?' but that isn't really how this works."
Romano envisioned the future model revolving around charging stations located where people were already stopping for extended periods. He didn't expect the quick-in, quick-out charging station to garner a significant place. Understanding this change, however, was challenging when one's perspective hasn't broken from the past.
Inspired by his observations at the time, here are four Brainzooming strategic thinking exercises to better envision future strategy for your organization when success depends on breaking (as best possible) from a historical perspective.
Challenge #1 – Extrapolating from Today: Romano stressed the futility of imagining a car charging model by extrapolating from the current auto fueling one. The key was to experience (or imagine the experience of) driving an electric vehicle with its differing needs.
Strategic Thinking Exercise: Create an interactive, day-in-the-life scenario to imagine the future. Do the homework upfront via research, forward-looking case studies, immersing users in prototypes or virtual reality experiences, and simulating the future ahead. Providing a robust future view helps people more thoroughly envision it for your audiences and organization.
Participants will take on roles as future audience members. Within the role playing, they will brainstorm specific questions, challenges, opportunities, and behaviors they will encounter. This lets participants envision a typical future day unfolding sequentially.
It’s not unusual for brainstorming exercises to stipulate that every starting idea is good. To help future-imagining Brainzooming participants detach from today as much as possible, we anticipate one person steeped in the forward-looking research taking on a unique role: Owner of the Future. This person will listen for present-day thinking that no longer applies, in the future. If they hear speculation inconsistent with the future, they'll exclaim loudly, "The future doesn’t work like that!" Yes, the role is different. Played by the right person, we think it will lighten things up and focus ideas.
Challenge #2 - Emerging Events Seem Microscopic: Before the next major event becomes major, it has minimal impact. Maybe 1% of the next big thing will be apparent while the status quo accounts for 99% of what we experience. At some point in the future, whatever the next big thing is will account for the overwhelming majority of instances, but not immediately.
Strategic Thinking Exercise: Quantify statistics about the current status quo and emerging situations, using them in an exercise where you flip the numbers. Associate the minimal numbers of the emerging development with the abundant numbers of the status quo, and vice versa. Once you blatantly reset the future view through a number flip, have participants imagine the future by asking:
Challenge #3 – Thinking Technology Impacts Will Come Up Short: As we conduct future-looking research, several things are clear: digital availability, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things are all super-charging forward.
Strategic Thinking Exercise: While maybe not EVERYTHING will be digitized and automated, for the sake of imagining the future, you can comfortably say everything will be. Stipulating an all-digital future enables questions that make it more difficult to hold a today-centric perspective. Ask:
Future Strategy Challenge #4 – Dismantling What’s No Longer Necessary: Romano projected that if electric vehicles expand to predominate personal transportation, there will be need for only a tiny percentage of the 168,000 gas stations in the United States currently. The impact of dismantling this excess is significant.
Strategic Thinking Exercise: While it is cooler to restrict future thinking to new, innovative ideas, the impact of currently valuable assets losing utility provides another path to imagining the future. Use today's abundant things you flipped earlier and ask questions about what happens with them:
If you are trying to prepare your organization for an uncertain future, contact us. We can design in-person and online collaboration exercises to get as ready as possible for big changes in and around your organization! – Mike Brown