FSG has developed structured workshops to help clients take leave of “the tyranny of the present” and to start thinking expansively about future challenges and opportunities. These workshops fuse FSG’s futures expertise with the client’s business knowledge. Collectively, we explore emerging forces for change and their implications for consumers, markets and operations.
Problem: A major professional association for supply chain management was offering a conference on future issues. They needed a compelling and informative presentation on the future of business, society, and the world, followed by an exercise for the group that would “get their hands dirty” working with the closer-in implications of the broader presentation.
Solution: FSG offered its Catalysts for Change presentation to the group. In a little over an hour, the audience was given a compelling summary of where the future seems to be headed in five different dimensions. Then groups broke out to examine the potential effects of the intersection of particular sets of “Catalysts.” Participants reported that they were forced by the workshop to reconsider previous attitudes about the inevitability of further globalization of supply chains; to consider the possible necessity of a closer-to-home-sourced future; and to question many of their other assumptions and their organizations’ investments.
Problem: A federal agency needed stakeholder input into its strategic planning activities to ensure that the agency’s thinking was sufficiently broad and rigorous about the issues and forces for change that would be shaping its future operating environment.
Solution: FSG organized a series of half-day “Accelerator-Derailer Workshops” in different operating regions and for diverse groups of agency stakeholders. These A/D workshops dissected trends and issues to illuminate factors that could accelerate or intensify a given trend or possibly derail or attenuate the trend. Participants were prompted to look for recurring accelerators and derailers, and non-intuitive relationships among issues. The insights generated proved to be important contributions to agency planning scenarios and helped ensure these were based on a rich and varied pool of experiences and perspectives.