The first thing you need to do as a manager or as a decision-maker to better anticipate the future is to step in the shoes of the analyst and to understand what is shaping the landscape. In fact, in your effort to better anticipate the future and to reinvent accordingly, it seems that the greatest challenge to address lies in avoiding the temptation to believe that business as usual is the only possible option out there. This section is divided up into three videos. In this first video, we'll discuss why this is a challenge and how we could overcome it. In the second video, we’ll discuss a short, generic example. And in the last video, we’ll conclude. In order to avoid the 'business as usual' temptation, it will indeed be crucial to identify the developments and the exogenous forces shaping the future. These developments and forces could bring about radically different realities. Sometimes, these developments and forces need to be identified. Other times, they may be straightforward but you and your team might be ignoring their long-term effects, and just hoping for the best. The individual looking to better anticipate what the future could hold should obviously not do that. So it is vital to shed light on these forces and developments and to account for them in your analysis. It is also vital to understand what future realities these forces and developments could bring about, and what the world would look like then. Perhaps you can think about this from your own special point of view. What is happening around you at a local, regional and global level that could undermine 'business as usual' for you and/or for your activity? Pause this video for a moment and think about this. There are of course as many answers as people in this world! And throughout this class, we’ll take a moment to pause and to think about your own special case. This should give you some food for thought! An important point on this topic though: Note that the name of the game here is by no means prediction. Those that try to predict, including experts, are not always correct and are often outperformed by those using a coin toss to predict the future. In other words, single-point predictions are useless in developing an open mind-set towards the future. So let’s stay away from that. What we’re really trying to do instead is to map out different potential trajectories and outcomes that are mutually exclusive and that represent most of tomorrow’s possible realities. I say most because, admittedly, surprises can occur and bring you to a radically different place than what you initially imagined. We’ll speak more about these strategic surprises in the next module. You have different tools to identify potential future trajectories and outcomes and to ultimately envision the different realities that the future could hold: Horizon scanning, which concentrates on identifying issues over the horizon; Historical analysis, which looks to identify enduring dynamics and relevant benchmarks and analogies; Feedback, or the dashboard approach, which lets you take the temperature in a particular situation and identify the relevant indicators that will matter in the long run; Microeconomics, which concentrates on the drivers of supply and demand that affect the overall outcomes on markets and beyond; And finally, cultural factors, which can either distort expectations or accelerate the convergence between different sets of expectations. We’ll take a look at each of these tools in the coming module. As we do, it’s important not to lose sight of the ultimate objective though: understand the exogenous forces that shape the future, the ways these forces could interact with each other and the various outcomes or scenarios, they could bring about. All five of these tools (horizon scanning, feedback, historical analysis, microeconomic analysis and cultural analysis) can help you identify these exogenous forces shaping the future. Before we go to a practical example to apply this, let’s make sure we’re on the same wavelength. What does planning for the future entail? A – Hope for the best B – Predict the future C – Consider different possible future outcomes and their implications for you today D – None of the above? I think that if you’re still with me, you will agree that the answer is definitely C. In this class, and in this module in particular, we are not in the business of prediction. Instead, we’re trying to map out different potential trajectories and outcomes that a diligent observer could reasonably expect in the future. Now let’s apply this to a very specific example.