Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Welcome to the Think Forward podcast where we have conversations with futurists, innovators and big thinkers about what lies ahead. We explore emerging trends on the horizon and what it means to be a futurist.
Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Think Forward EP 126 - Art of Future Preparedness with Dr. Rene Rohrbeck
Organizations today face an urgent need to be future-ready. The conversation with Dr. Rene Rohrbeck emphasizes the critical role of strategic foresight in achieving business resilience and success in a rapidly changing environment. Companies that prioritize foresight not only adapt to emerging market trends but also enhance their financial performance.
• Introduction of future fitness focused on proactive preparedness
• Personal background influencing Dr. Rohrbeck's foresight perspective
• The necessity of foresight in strategy and its impact on performance
• Exploration of the future fitness framework: thinking, storytelling, and systems
• Discussion of ethical considerations in corporate foresight
• Call for democratization of foresight education to empower individuals and organizations
For the VIDEO Episode: https://youtu.be/ilafVPx7dW8
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Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.
Welcome to the Think Forward show. Let's explore the future together.
Steve:Welcome friends and fellow big thinkers to another exciting episode of Think Forward, where we explore the ever-evolving frontiers of the future. Today we have a guest whose career journey has been shaped by history, transformation and the ability to anticipate what's next. Imagine growing up in West Berlin, surrounded by the Iron Curtain, witnessing what seemed stable until it wasn't. That experience shaped his understanding of uncertainty and the importance of strategic foresight. From navigating the shifting ties at Deutsche Telekom to pioneering systematic ways of preparing for the future, our guest has spent his career helping organizations anticipate change before it happens. Career helping organizations anticipate change before it happens.
Steve:He's built a career out of exploring how businesses can stay future prepared, identifying patterns of innovation and challenging the traditional approaches to strategy. His research has revealed surprising insights, like why the most successful companies often ignore foresight until it's too late, and he's dedicated to changing that mindset. Today we'll dive deep into how organizations can build future fitness, why strategic foresight is making a comeback and how a data-driven approach can help leaders spot the opportunities and the risks ahead. Welcome to episode 126 of the Think Forward Show the Art of Future Preparedness with Dr Rene Vorbeck. Rene, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the show.
Rene:Thanks, glad to be here.
Steve:So I've been following your work for many years. As in you know, you have a lot of diverse backgrounds cross-corporate foresight and just the field itself. But for those who are learning about the space or learn about your work, can you just kind of go into your background, tell us about yourself and, you know, kind of your journey into foresight?
Rene:Sure. So I mean, I'm born in Western Berlin, so it was always a thing which I think marked me to be sort of in the in the center of history, in the sense that West Berlin was surrounded by the Iron Curtain and this looked very stable when I was a child, until it was no longer stable and the Cold War came to an end. So I had this, this, this sense of okay. You need to be able to anticipate what is happening, and that caught up with me in my corporate life. So when I was working at Deutsche Telekom in particular, a company which came from being very, very stable because it was a state-owned monopoly, to suddenly being in a free market and a market which is basically going upside down, so no longer the companies which own the network are powerful, but the ones who are bringing the services to the end customer are powerful, new business models appearing, et cetera. That is, I think, the two things which marked really my career, because it ingrained in me this desire to be able to be systematic about preparing for the future.
Steve:So how old were you when the wall fell? Sorry, how old were you when the wall fell, when the Berlin Wall?
Rene:fell. I was 14.
Steve:You were 14. So that's a very influential age. I mean, that is a life-defining event, you know, for everyone in the world. Yeah, so we're about the same age. I remember, I just remember people dancing on it. You know, I just remember this, you know, you just you could see, you could watch history happening, right, you could see a sense of change. But you know things like you just mentioned companies going from state owned to, you know, free market. Did that change? Did that kind of change your perspective on the opportunities you had in front of you, Like the things you wanted to do with your life? Did it just anything you might have thought of just completely upended and you had to rethink Because you're also at a place where you didn't have to go, you weren't in yet, right. So you're kind of like what are you going to?
Rene:do right with your life. It's true, I mean, I think for my first job was was really influential for me. I was working in the deutsch telekom laboratories and we were kind of directly associated with the chief strategy and innovation officer, so we got a lot of these very strategic questions on our desk and I still remember that I was quite fresh in the business, quite naive, thinking okay, there must be people in corporate strategy who ask the big questions and find big answers to what will be the future of our company look like, what will be the business model we're running? How do we face up to all these new competitors suddenly being in this space, which was called telecommunications and now is being called information and communication technologies, and apps coming, et cetera, only to find out that a typical corporate strategy department is often very conservative. I mean, they're thinking about how do we keep our business model going? Do we make maybe a strategic acquisition? Do we need to get rid of part of our business because it's no longer profitable?
Rene:But these kind of zooming out questions where you take two steps back and you ask yourself, okay, what will the future of this industry look like and how will we play in that future? Very few people asking this question and sometimes, as I found out later also in my research, in my practice, sometimes this is really a decision which needs to be taken by the owners, not just by the board of directors needs to be taken by the owners, not just by the board of directors. And yet we are probably living in times where more and more companies will have these fundamental considerations to make. So this is a little bit also how I'm wired and how I look at this world to say well, actually, your business model might get challenged in the future, you might need to rethink how you're positioned in your own industry, what your industry will look like. And the ones who think early are also the ones who get then the nice spots in the world. Today.
Steve:We'll get to that, I think, in a little bit, but I wanted to ask you about where Futures and Foresight. Futures Research is a research field. You're a researcher, but you're also a consultant and a practitioner, so you have both. You take both sides of that world. When you look at organizations, what do you see? Is there a way to reconnect foresight, because it seems to be an orphaned function. If you will, it should live in strategy. Logically, it should live in this strategy, the strategy group, strategy team or even innovation, you know connected to innovation or some some pathway right to to feed in that.
Steve:I've talked to some others and we've talked about the forecasting and the foresight field almost kind of splitting fracturing. In the 70s and 80s they kind of like went their separate directions right and forecasting is just the extrapolation of existing data on that versus foresight, which is a bit different. Where do you think it can be? You know, kind of find foster care or adoption, like. Where do you think it its role optimally? This is not a one size fits all, but where do you think it's? As you said, there's changes happening and companies need to rethink things and readapt and this is a perfect way to bring that to. I think, a powerful capability inside an organization. Where do you think that's going?
Rene:I think one needs to look at this on different levels.
Rene:I mean, one level which you mentioned is sort of where is foresight in strategy?
Rene:And here I'd like to echo a little bit the title of a Harvard Business Review article which Amy Webb wrote when I'm sitting on the advisory board of the Global Foresight Network in the World Economic Forum and she said well, it's about time that we bring foresight back to strategy or into strategy.
Rene:Yes, and I think that's a very sound observation, because when you go back some 30 years, then it would have been very natural to think about foresight being central to strategy. But once Michael Porter entered the world and also Jay Barney entered the world, to say, okay, well, maybe strategy is more about this positioning, so we're already in the market and we're not going to touch this, and in that market I'm competing with other companies and I need now to work out in detail how I'm going to be better than others in this market in order to have the most profitable spot or the biggest share of the pie, and this kind of focused away from truly strategic questions like where do I want to play, how do I want to win towards a kind of more optimization within strategy.
Steve:So I think on this level of where is foresight in strategy in organizations?
Rene:well, it was pushed off center stage, but it's coming back right now. And it's coming back because there's way more uncertainty surrounding companies. So you realize that it's not anymore an optimization game of target against Walmart, but it is okay. What will the future of retail look like, which is really going to drive your business forward?
Rene:Now, I think a totally different level of what is Foresight doing to you is kind of asking well, can we even imagine a world where companies are continuing to live without Foresight, so in other words, just optimizing themselves right now? And I think I can imagine a world like this. This is a world where is also not very resilient, because I'm just trying to continue making the lifeline of my business longer, While I should really be asking more fundamental questions about, you know, will my license to operate still be viable if I'm a company in the energy field and I'm burning coal field and I'm burning coal? Or will my business model be viable in the way I set it up, with global supply chains when the world is fragmenting, et cetera, et cetera. So I think this role of strategy, almost more on the level of the shareholders or the level of a strong supervisory board is getting more and more important.
Steve:You did some seminal research and I shared with you and I've cited you often in so many things and you've been unwittingly a great advocate in me making the case for corporate foresight with places, especially for those who are, I would say, more quantitative and short-term. You did a paper in 2015. You talked about measuring corporate foresight's impact. I mean, what other things, like I would say, findings, if you will, should leaders know about this kind of relationship, like when you talk about that? That research was fascinating, like how it came to be. It's a longitudinal study. I mean, it took many years to do so. Did that impact? Is this? Is that impacted? Um, you know the conversations today as well that you have with people yes, I think there's.
Rene:There's a lot of things which are extremely contemporary in in this and where, in many maybe, this study was just ahead of its time. Actually, when you look at, you know who cites this, who uses this. Many of those citations they're coming more from recent times. So I asked at that time a question which many few people were asking. So typically, you know, the question was more around well, if I want to have a kind of life insurance towards the future, shouldn't I pay at least one or two futurists which are sitting inside my organization and which are informing me about big trends coming up? Or should I maybe hire a futurist once a year to come and join a board meeting, et cetera? And I asked a completely different question and I was asking the question what are my capabilities? So something I can do regularly, can rely on, which makes me future prepared? And remember that at 2008, where all this research started, people were looking at me with big eyes and saying what are you even talking about? So I started to build a model which allows me to track okay, what are people doing in order to load themselves with insights about the future. What are companies doing? And I call this prospecting, to make this mental time travel into a world which might be different from their world today and which lives already in the potentiality which I'm observing today. And then how do I probe into this to find out if there's new business potential? Do I venture into this? Do I have innovation which I accelerate, etc.
Rene:So this model, equipped with this model, I went into the field. I did first a lot of case studies to find out what are companies actually doing and what do they get out of it. And then I said, okay, let's look at this also quantitatively. And the first quantitative result was a shock. What I did is that, in 2008, I said, okay, let's look at who has great strategic foresight capabilities and how good is their financial performance, hoping obviously to see, okay, there's a strong correlation, you need to be future prepared in order to be successful. And then what I find is the opposing correlation. So the companies are doing great, they're actually not having a lot of foresight, and I thought, okay, how can that be explained? And then, in more case study research, you come to the realization that you're also measuring the opposite. So when you have high profitability, when you're doing well in terms of growth, then you're not interested in asking what-if questions about your own future. So then the next question obviously becomes well, what if we wait? What if we look at what is happening with the companies over the next couple of years? So here indeed, and we we waited seven years, or we rather tracked also some companies over time, and here we find now, luckily for our field, right, we find the correlation in the right direction and there's a couple of very interesting phenomena which we uncover.
Rene:So we did a number of different tests in the data. So one of the things we were interested in is to find out whether there were companies who are future prepared and who made it from the top of the pile in their industry to being outperformers in their industry. And that's something you can only do with case study research. So we had only 15 case studies in this, but there's six out of them who made it from the bottom of the pile to the top of the pile because they made also what we like to refer to as a meaningful strategic move.
Rene:So, for instance, one company which was just a drug company and it was in a kind of me-too situation there's all the drugs they're selling pretty much they were also sold by other companies and it's this real red ocean. And they realized okay, digitalization is entering my field. So what if I'm not only giving a drug but I'm also helping? You know, local doctors um, there's also malaria drugs they had, and so on and I'm giving digital tools to, um, the um, the people on the field, and they were the first one to do it and that allowed them suddenly to have a digital interface with their customers. And this is, of course, very, very interesting. And ultimately, what we find also when we look at the total sample, is that companies which are what we call vigilant, so that they have the right level of foresight for their given situation, they outperform the companies which have not by quite big margins 33% higher profitability and 200% higher growth rates.
Steve:So you mentioned case studies. Did you do surveys to gather specific data points in the case studies? And secondly, did you track the kind of? Were there actual people doing those roles? Were there people that had it as a function and like, how did you define them as doing this type of work? Like, were there different buckets or categories of of the of the functions they did? Like she kind of like level one or two, like, did you? You it's kind of the growth you talk about going from the bottom of the pile to the top of the pile. There had to be a function in the, in the growth of the. What they did as a in in their organization. Right, they had to have more people or more research or trends like, or systems like. What did you look at in that way?
Rene:and we we try to get a holistic picture when we do our research and we try to be robust also in our measurement. These are the different ways of setting something up and setting up the foresight function, if you will. So there's a couple of things we do. So the first thing is that we want to identify the need of an organization. And we define the need of an organization to do foresight by two main factors One is the level of uncertainty which surrounds it, and then the second is its strategic ambition. And there we are asking whether a company wants to be what we call a prospector, so one which is always first into a market, it's creating new markets, completely new offerings or whether it's an analyzer which is kind of the second one into a market, or whether it's a defender which basically protects the market which already exists and protects the market which already exists and protects the market share.
Rene:So these two main factors, they're influencing the need of an organization. And now when you ask, okay, how good is an organization in foresight? And I could in principle go and and count heads of how many people are doing foresight or things like that. But we try to drill deeper and what we are asking is, along our model, along the functions we would like foresight capability to be able to execute on, how mature are you? And we have a maturity model behind. So it's 21 factors which we look at. And all of these factors they are capabilities. So an organizational outcome which I can get, and that goes all the way from being aware of signals, trends, et cetera, to taking action. So it's fast.
Rene:I often like to simplify a bit by saying this is we try to track the nervous system of an organization directed at the future. So it goes much further than just asking how many foresight people do you have. It's really asking well, are you actually using scenario thinking regularly in your strategic decision making, for example? And that could be done by a foresighter, it could also be done by a strategy unit, it could also be done by the top management team themselves, and we want to be agnostic of how you do it, but we want to know whether you have it and whether you can be sure that this capability is always there for you to enjoy. This is how we measure.
Steve:Great answer. You know I, I I used a lot of futures work in my innovation work and I know you wrote a paper on three roles in enhancing capacity. I find that not just the strategy group but the innovation capability of an organization is a sweet spot for this. Because if you think about the lens of, say, like, a chief product officer, they're kind of looking at that 12 to 18 months, right, the portfolio they're going. I mean, they're looking at things but they're relying on the innovation function. I separated even from R&D.
Steve:But the innovation function of new business models, product services that can make it through its portfolio investments and become products for the product officer, right. But like leading that outward, how do you know what possible future is evolving, what the markets are doing? Where do you make those bets? Right, it kind of has to inform that. So it's almost like that tip of the spear edge of the farthest to the telescope, right, the dark side of the moon telescope that can really see things more clearly, to inform the innovation function, the dark side of the moon telescope that can really see things more clearly to inform you know the innovation function. So you know what did you? What did you find with those Like what are those three roles?
Rene:Like for the for for those who haven't read, obviously read the paper, so Well, here we we also went basically into the field and identified companies which have a four-side function and we asked them simply what do you do? And then every case study is kind of informing about typically one or two or three specific things a certain function in a given company is performing. And for this particular paper I think we used some 15 such case studies and what we then did is that we kind of tried to cluster this around what is this doing to innovation? And we identify three roles. So the first role is what we call the initiator role, and that's probably also something which most people would associate with foresight. So maybe you know also a bit like design thinking. You get signals, and you're not only getting signals from what your customers can tell you already today, but you also think about what our future customer needs. You think also about what kind of capabilities would new technologies enable in your product and service portfolio? What else could you offer? And an initiator role is typically also a kind of matchmaking role between the market and the technology-facing units. So this is something which we saw in many of the 15 companies that they have a role to play where you say, well, what is the technologies which will become mature in five years' time, and what kind of functions in my products and services could that enable? And then, how big is the market for these functions? What's the willingness to pay? Can we make it happen? And so that eventually it becomes an R&D project or a product development project?
Rene:The second role is is is something which which we are somewhat surprised at first, because we were really only thinking about this initiator role when we entered the field that, through Steve Jobs, who was the biggest opponent you can think about in a tech driven company, being a marketeer, I'm not excited about this technology. I want to know what this is doing. And for every successful product, you typically have a strong innovator, but you have also a strong opponent who makes sure that you get the best out of this innovation effort and, with that, having also winning product or service. And what in many organizations, the foresight units were asked to do is to come in in strategic project reviews, in project definition meetings, in gate meetings, in order, with their broader perspective, to say okay, all this is nice when you think only about us, but there's this company out there which we've seen and they have an alternative technology and it will be, in the end, superior to our technology. So we either close our project down or we better talk to these guys and see if we can have a collaboration. So this opponent role can be played out in different ways, but it's a very important one in order to get to winning products and winning services.
Rene:And the third role is what we refer to, the strategist role, and I think in your question you also were hinting a bit at that. You know it's often this question okay, where does that lead us? So, if we have a product or service like this, is that so unique in our value chain that we can control the markets, that we are kind of this central piece in the puzzle of the market? Also, where is that taking us in terms of future market shares, future pockets of value? Are the pockets of value so big that we can also consider M&A activities to capture that market, etc? So it was surprising for us at that time to see that not all companies have all roles, but if you look across companies, that there's quite a diverse set of activities Foresight units can engage in and create value for a company.
Steve:I love how you tied all that together and it leads me to kind of this you originally had you created a thing called the future fitness model and I wonder where that is, because your recent work on net positive businesses, which I wanted to maybe are they connected? Are they connected more? Is it an evolution of that? I'd love to kind of, I mean, you can explain the fitness model but maybe let's really kind of move toward the net positive, because it's really, I think that statement is, I think, a much more palatable phrase for companies. You know, and how to adopt it. You know, fitness is a good brand, it's a great brand. So but yeah, if you could like, let's talk about future fitness real quick, like kind of that, because I feel like that's foundational to like this evolution, like where it is to make net positive businesses.
Rene:Yeah, yeah, sure, I mean. We started to call it future fitness only a couple of years back, because before we called it future preparedness, a company how indeed fit a company is, in order to pivot when the market is changing, when a big change is coming their way and in our mind, fitness, or for having a future fitness you need at least three things. The first is that you need to be capable of this future back thinking. You need to be able, as a company, not just to say where am I today, what are my capabilities, what can I do with it, but also to say, well, if we look five years, 10 years into the future and the market would be very different how do we get a favorable spot in that market? What is my superior position in the markets of the future? What is my superior position in the markets of the future? It also means that you need, as an organization, be capable of finding and defining strong narratives so that you can bring people along that you can say, okay, today we Kodak and we are a chemical company, but tomorrow we still Kodak and we are a digital company. And what does that mean? And how do we pivot? And finally, you need to be able and that's also where foresight can help, but which is inside future fitness is. You need to go beyond this kind of linear thinking of saying today I'm here and then I need to be there and you know, there's just a change project I need to execute on. Typically big changes. They come on a system level and I need to be capable, as an organization, to understand how systems shift. And they don't shift in a linear fashion, they shift in in an S curve fashion. They also, for a long time, look implausible until they start to happen very fast, and they are. You know, they're often counterintuitive. So this is something which organizations and their planning mechanisms and their governance mechanisms they need to be capable of dealing with. And what sort of made us migrate now towards then.
Rene:Also, what will become a new center here at the EDEC Business School in France, which is one of the top 10 business schools in Europe, is one of our core strategic pillars is to say, well, we as business schools, we need to be part of creating organizations which have a healing, which have a regenerative impact on its ecosystem. And if you want, you know, on one hand, that goes all the way back, maybe to the 70s, where people like Klaus Schwab, who was the founder of the World Economic Forum, has written a book about stakeholder capitalism. It can even go further back, you know where. Here in France there was somebody called Gaston Berger who created what is known as the prospective school, where he says humanity needs to be capable of taking destiny into its own hand. And and I think this is something where, um, obviously you know, foresight would have a strong set of mechanisms, a strong set of tools to help.
Rene:So already some some years back, we started to say can we not apply Foresight on an industry level and help organizations who share one industry? And we're working on two industries today. One is the building sector and the other one is the agriculture, food and health sector. We see this kind of connected and say what are pathways in a sustainable development? So what are sustainability pathways? And this is something which now comes back in an even more powerful approach to say we want to not only think about how can we become better, but also what is the missions which we have actually as an industry and how can we apply future-backed thinking and future-backed planning to get there.
Rene:So today in most cities, the industry of buildings, construction, real estate, et cetera. They're failing all of us because they are not getting us livable construction, real estate, et cetera. They're failing all of us because they are not getting us livable, affordable and sustainable buildings. Often it's the opposite, particularly the young ones, which are not yet in the real estate market and don't own real estate yet. So how can we create an industry which can deliver for us what we as humanity need? And, of course, how can we also ensure that we safeguard our life support system, our planet Earth, and what needs to be done there to decarbonize industries, etc. So it's really this trajectory which, in a way, for us was very natural, but where I'm taking a lot of joy out because it's hands-on. Often when we talk foresight, we talk big visions, scenarios, et cetera, but for us it's really about okay, where do we need to invest, where do we need to change business models and how can we execute on that together with the partners in our programs.
Steve:Well, it's interesting that you talk about the fitness versus preparedness, right. So I always talk about futures work as navigating uncertainty very much, charting a course, because you know, as the adage goes, futures don't predict the future. We look at possible futures right, preferred all the different. All the adage goes, futures don't predict the future. We look at possible futures right, preferred all the different P's in the cone, in the futures cone, right. But as those things, those futures, become the present, we have the ability to make more proactive type of change. And when I look at, when I think of the word preparedness, I think of like emergency preparedness or you're preparing for a thing to happen and when it happens you have to react to it, activate to it, right, versus to your other word of you know, fitness, where you're always training but you're always, but you're doing things you know, I think of just on a personal level, like I snowboard and I love it deeply. Will I be able? Hopefully I can do it when I'm 80. I'm not like going on the terrain park and doing crazy things, but I have to be fit. I have to do strength training but I'm actively doing the thing that I'm enjoying, so it's kind of the active practice of it and the fitness of it. So I like your distinction, your bifurcation of those two and how you moved away from that, because I think actually older futures were definitely more prepared, like preparedness driven.
Steve:You know Herman Kahn's work. It's always about we're prepared for a nuclear war. You don't want it to occur, but it's like like you have to prepare for eventualities. It's kind of like what Shell did early on. It's like preparing for an oil embargo or a thing to occur itself. Versus the proactive change and I think the use of net positive and we can I don't like to use get all rosy colored. I'm very much an optimist when it comes to the future but at the same time thinking positively about that.
Steve:How do you make the change? How do you bring those together? I think is a really whole, is is I use another you know fluffy term like holistic, it's like, but it is giving someone, I think, who is non-futures focused an easier access to what it means to use this in an organization. Right, and you know you had mentioned you had 21 kind of elements of like, maturity and things like that. Do you categorize that in terms of organizational size, practice tool set, mindset, right, it's like you know, how do you break that down? Like, how do you take the maturity, like when you look at it, because it's a good lens to keep, because you can look at that longitudinally over time, is you know, and you obviously can tweak it, but it definitely sets a set of foundational. You know, as my wife is a researcher, it gives you the grounding in the data. Over time you can continue to use that as your model.
Rene:Yeah, of course I mean the indicators we check. We can also check over time and in this way you can measure your own fitness right when you go to to. Either you know your, your physician, who who tests your, your fitness and sport, or you know your, you monitor yourself with a wearable device. The same thing we want to do for for organizations. Um, it's sometimes funny because there's people who tell me look, rene, typically you know, the older you get, the more relaxed you get, but you seem to getting more and more anxious and in a way, you know, I think it's true I'm getting not anxious, but I'm actually getting more impatient that's a stark difference.
Steve:There's a stark difference in the anxious versus impatience right, because you just do it now versus the you know, is it going to happen? Yeah, that's a good distinction between that.
Rene:So for me, it's really that I'm also starting to get a bit impatient with us as a field, in a sense of saying look, I mean, if you're telling somebody that they are in an uncertain world and that they need to do more to sort of cope with this uncertainty, it's not a particularly positive message. What we as a field also need to be capable of doing and I think we are quite capable of doing it, but we need to focus attention is to tell people okay, well, there's, there's a lot of opportunity you have of applying these types of thinking methods, this type of planning methods, in order to be agile enough to lead change, to become proactive about your own destiny, to lead your company and maybe also your industry and maybe even humanity to a better place. And that is sort of what, on the one hand, you know with future fitness we're trying to put an emphasis on. It's like you who was thinking already about when is the snow good enough to be back on the slope? And companies also want to be fit to be back on the slope. Companies also want to be fit to be back on the slope and they need something to measure this capacity, and you can, of course, measure it in the outcome. So I can come with my camera and film you and then I'm telling you look, last year you were a bit faster down the slope and you looked a bit cooler. So maybe you need to do something more. The slope and you looked a bit cooler, so maybe you need to do something more. Um, and that's something we do.
Rene:Also, look at we say what's your track record as an organization to have ventured into new businesses, um, to accelerate new, new parts of your offerings? So there's an outcome component, but there's also a throughput component. So how capable are you in observing what's going on around you? Are you capable of seeing 80% of all the factors which will influence your business in the next five years, and that ahead of competitors? Are you capable of doing that? And we can can, of course, also then check over time whether that is continuing continuously, true or not true, or it's getting better or it's uh, it's, it's starting to deteriorate.
Rene:And we need to remember that whenever we're doing very well as individuals or as companies, we start to become complacent, we start to feel, okay, we're doing good, why should I worry too much? And what we can maybe afford once we have paid our mortgage and once we had enough stocks stuck away, a company cannot afford. A company can at any time fail and our job as futurists is to prepare them for, sometimes, the unexpected. But what I would also emphasize is we need to prepare organizations for the big tides which are moving in.
Rene:Most companies are quite capable of saying, ok, there's another wave, let's prepare for this. And I know this because there's waves coming all the time. But you might still remember, either for yourself or for your kids, you know this frustration when you build this fantastic sandcastle and there's these waves coming and there's always withstanding these waves, and then you go and grab some lunch and you come back and your sandcastle is gone. You say I cannot even see where it used to be. And the same can happen with companies where you say I'm doing great and getting attacked by competitors, but then you know five years later you have overlooked that your entire industry got digitalized and your entire sandcastle is gone.
Rene:And this is also something we need to help companies because, by default, our planning methods and also our perception as humans is not wired towards tides, it's wired towards waves.
Steve:It's interesting. You bring that up To my research. I agree with you completely. We're at a bigger pivot in history than people realize and you hear news about that. It's always it's like, oh, this election is the biggest and the last and it's the changing history or this thing.
Steve:Well, I'm one of the things in my work. I'm a cycles theorist. I look at pattern cycle change right, and I look at macro history very much so, and I've looked at like the last thousand years of history and for me I've looked at this in terms of 200-year ages. And then within that there are eras it's called the ages and eras, social change, and appropriately, because that's what it is. But it's like those cycles and within that I look at waves. I call them get waves. So there's a geopolitical, economic, technological, and when you look at a wave, right you have the swell, the crest, the break, the trial, right, and it comes in and they come pinion and they continue to change and make that we're at this and they're not like this immediate cutoff, they kind of overlap the ages themselves, this last 200 years and people will talk about, you know, like klaus talked about the fourth industrial revolution, the third, and you know, you know ict.
Steve:I look at it as this this is like an age of machines, like for the last 200 years. We've automated with machines. We've automated everything mechanically, building how we do things right, and that factory approach, even our workplace, like you I worked in. I remember one job I went into. It was like they did a lot of pair programming. I worked with this company and it was just rows of computers and people would work together. You could replace that with sewing machines. It was still a factory of sorts, right. So that factory mindset, the Taylorism, that Fordism, and even in the way we construct education to prepare people for a workforce, it's the same. It's all that model.
Steve:So we have to rethink, not just like the last 70 years of institutions, but the last 200, as generative AI, other types of intelligence. It's a new age of intelligence. And what does that mean? As things overtake you, right, that is not just changing. Like you know, your a new product or service. That could be fundamental, radical shifts in the business. And, to your point, a business can go out of business at any time, right, if they're not prepared for it.
Steve:To me, this field is not the panacea, not the solution for all, but is a darn good tool, it's a darn good force for good to make that change. So I agree with you in that, you know, having that look, you know, and it's and it kind of leads me to making the case right. It's like you've got this great research you've done, you've done work with a lot of great companies. We've. You know, I've talked to a lot of people across the years.
Steve:But when you talk to the people who are, let's say, more short term, you know, financial driven, you know they're just, they're good at what they do, right, they build businesses, they run companies, they're awesome, they're operators right. When you make the business case, how do you help those who's like say, it's like me, like one person, who's that futurist team of one, right, they're trying to move the boulder up the mountain like Sisyph one. Right, they're trying to move the boulder up the mountain like Sisyphus, right, maybe they get some budget and they bring you in. How do you help make the case? And it's also for people listening like, when they're trying to make that case, how do you advise in that way?
Rene:I mean I always and that's maybe also a transition in how I approach our field and our work, coming from the past where I was very much an analyst.
Rene:I love data, I love planning, I love looking at very clear theories and hypotheses which I can prove, and so on and so on, very clear theories and hypotheses which I can prove, and so on and so on. And I would be kind of content at least I used to be content by delivering this brilliant report which is spot on, which tells you, based on data, what's going to happen and what the implications are, et cetera, et cetera. And one advantage of growing a bit older over time is that you realize many of the brilliant analysis you've done. They have just not been put in practice. So my own practice and that's also maybe to your point what would I advise? Well, it's all about the people you can take with you, either directly, by you engaging foresight projects, or indirectly, by engaging them with the material. You have One thing which was also influential, if you want, in my thinking about all of Big predators have already gone and you start picking the small fries until we got ourselves organized, and that's what we call the consciousness revolution.
Rene:And that's only some 70,000 years ago and you can trace humanity on the planet some 300,000 years where we were quite an unremarkable species. But after the conscious revolution we started to get organized. And today it's amazing how you can get organized right. I mean, you can be a company like Bosch with 430,000 employees and they're somewhat organized together. It's a huge force. Same thing, obviously, for countries, and what ties us together is narratives, narratives which people subscribe to who are inside that organized group. And then you can cascade that down and ultimately, our capacity as foresighters to build collective narratives which people believe is what, what allows us then to make big changes, and the same true as is for any change maker.
Rene:This, this kind of myth that you know a big company is like, like an army, everyone just follows orders. It's just that. It's just the myth, right. But foresight and leadership is all about creating a joint understanding about why something is desirable, how we can get there, and that this is realistic. And then you have people following this and people pitching in, doing something which was not planned for but which is taking you in that direction. So even even as the you know, if I want to stay with your picture of this lone foresighter in a 250,000 employee company, you know, I would not advise to say try to make the most brilliant report and then publish it to everyone so that they can read. I would encourage to think about this from the other angle and say who can I impact and how do I create joint narratives with these people? Not just my narrative, and they need to read it, but what's the joint narrative which can create real action and real movement in my organization?
Steve:Yeah, my advice when I give it is and I'm giving the unsolicited advice here is I'm curious to get your. Your take on this is find your tribe. So it can be, it can take a while, but, to your point, make that impact, get some word of mouth, but even just having a like, if you can get permission to do an internal newsletter on like little trends you're finding and just share that with people. I find that there's three layers of group. There's the core, true believers, the people that you find that really want to build something. Then the second, or the futures fluent. They want to bring this into their work, they want to learn the craft but they're not like that's the pure future. They see its value and they could be your best evangelist. To me that's the power circle, but it has to be powered by the true believers to be able to help push that out. And then there's what I will call future friends, or future. You know they're the futures interested. That's where you kind of get everybody on a Slack group or Slack channels right, or you create a newsletter. You get people interested in projects or even just sharing trends. They find it just kind of like a signals. You know people just that really are interested in this and find it a fascinating space. But they also become aware of this so that when, to your point, when you make those small bits of impact, they can share that with their boss, a place that, like Bosch, which is going to you know hundreds of thousands of people, but if they're a part of that, you can reach parts of the organization.
Steve:That's what I find, but it takes time. It does take time to do that and even finding that core, true believers. You might be alone for a while but you still can find people. But I think, to your point, as time goes on, I am impatient as well. I think this decade is just critical for it to be. It will be used by those who get it and I think it's to those who don't or ignore it at their peril. I do, but you know there's people who have successfully done it and they fail to bring this in. I mean, you've worked with companies and seen the varying degrees of success. I mean, what do you think separates the? I won't categorize it in terms of losing or winning, but like those who have been successful at it and those who have struggled with it, like where do you? Where do you see the what's what separates them Like? What are those factors?
Rene:I think that I mean, I'm seeing many foresight units which have fantastic thinkers and which are often so well read into so many things. They're very brilliant and they can have fantastic conversations with one another in the group, in the group, but they find it hard to find the real pain points in an organization because they often look almost too mundane or too uninteresting, et cetera, and that's often a kind of recipe for failure. Right, you're doing fantastic work and the other professionals of the field they applaud this, they find this great, you influence each other, but you're not addressing real pain points of an organization. And I had the chance early in my career to drop on such pain points. It was actually quite funny story.
Rene:We've been sort of doing foresight work on the corporate headquarter for some time. We had some reports out there and so on, and after some time, you know, we got asked hey, you're spending a lot of money, can you find out where you're creating impact? We said, oh well, yeah, that's probably a question we should have some answer for. So we started to go around to all these people who receive our reports and suddenly I've got this call with a colleague from T-Venture, which is the venture arm of Deutsche Telekom and at that time they were investing some 800 million euros into small companies in order to have this window to innovation. And they said, yeah, you're these guys from the technology radar. Look, it's here on my desk. And every time I'm looking at my deal flow, I'm looking whether it's also in your radar. I'm like, oh, wow, okay, well, it's not meant to be used that way, but it's probably quite useful and we're glad that we have such a customer as you're here in at the inside and you realize that they had a huge pain point, so they had a really hard time to figure out in our industry.
Rene:What is this startup even doing? So I can look at a startup just at the slides. They give me the financial numbers they have. Or I can ask the more interesting question of what is the end game this startup is living to create. Will that be disruptive in my industry, and if yes, how? What will happen? Will that be disruptive in my industry and if yes, how? What will happen?
Rene:And they suddenly discovered sort of our work as being a proxy for answering exactly that question, and later on we also fine-tuned then what we produced a little bit more for this purpose. But there was a real pain point. So there were 800 million euros, and now it's close to 2 billion, which are regularly looking for places to get invested into, which will help a big corporate to be ready for the future. And that's, for example, one big pain point which I dropped on more by accident but which then was a huge value for the organization. And that's actually something which is also in a way, tying to my practice now.
Rene:I mean, you know that I created some 10 years ago a boutique consultancy company to help organizations to set up foresight capabilities. And some two years ago probably also in this moment where I felt a bit impatient and saying, well, yes, we find great value opportunities, but you don't take them we integrated actually into a venture builder with this foresight unit, which is called Creative Dock and which is Europe's biggest independent venture builder, so that we can actually, if we find an opportunity, we can also say we can build it for you. And this is, I think, this type of capability which more and more companies will need going forward in this fast-moving world that they can not only find opportunities but they can act on them very fast.
Steve:I mean doing new venture creation and venture building, venture studio work. That's definitely that innovation function of leading foresight into action. Right, it's taking that vision and leading it into the actual creation of it. You know, earlier we talked about, you know, strategy group like in bringing it into. That seems to be squarely a huge opportunity for companies if they're not taking it.
Steve:Especially like, how do you pick the things that are in your portfolio? How do you make the place those bets? Because most people when they think of innovation, it's doing innovation challenges or innovation sprints where you're creating new things. But how do you get to that thing? Right, how do you get to what you should do? Because most innovation functions in a corporation are run like venture firms. They have a portfolio of investment, they have to make bets and they go through different levels and do they make it through to the final right To get productized, right, to get fully launched and spun off. Right, and you increase your opportunity of, I think, the range of choice, the range and it's also the things that good corporate venture firms and venture capital invest in, things that are completely outside of the band of what you would normally think is in their space, right, but it some way it could be tangentially connected. Otherwise it just could be an opportunity like that they see that people need to take advantage of, right yeah?
Rene:I think also big companies need just to wake up to the speed at which things are happening today. Right, I mean, I'm also coming from a corporate world, um, and if you just look at the average time it took a company to become a $1 billion company, um, or become a unicorn, as we like to refer to it, with such private companies, you know, 50 years ago this this was kind of 80 years become a unicorn, as we like to refer to such private companies. 50 years ago, this was kind of 80 years. And the case in point is, for instance, harley-davidson. This is a company which took 86 years to become a 1 billion company in market valuation.
Rene:And if you look at Instagram, this was two and a half years. You look at instagram, this was two and a half years. And today, the average time it took a company which became recently a unicorn, it's two years. Wow, it's just incredible at which speed you can venture something which becomes a global company, a global brand, a, et cetera. And that's kind of turning a little bit this corporate strategic and innovation planning upside down, because you need to be basically out there directly and experiment and get market feedback, as opposed to taking it slow, making your strategic work and then starting with small experiments and 10 years later you're there on the market in a dominant position. That's just not going to happen anymore.
Steve:And I know recently you had an interview with our friend, christian Mulroff, who were at Itonics and you both talked about their platform is doing kind of an innovation operating system and how it looks at trends, and I'm very much doing a lot of work on artificial intelligence and generative AI with Foresight, and there's aspects where he's doing research as well into that and we talked a lot about where the human versus the machine comes in and what ratio of that Do you see it? How do you see that type of work like impacting, because we've talked about organizations being able to use it as a tool set, being able to wield it in ways that help you make to cheer point decisions faster versus the long that that kind of previous long game. What do you? What are your thoughts on it? Like, where do you see it? You know its benefit.
Rene:It's kind of cautious, uh advisory on it as well yeah, I mean it's uh, it's great that you bring this up. I mean it's a huge paradox coming our way here actually. Um, on the one hand, um, also in our foresight consulting practice, you're just amazed by the power you suddenly wield. I mean, earlier we would be limited by the number of reports we can read, the number of interns we could sort of work with to go into all kinds of interviews asking experts, et cetera, et cetera, and it would take a lot of energy, it would take a lot of time, and now you can instantaneously crunch huge amounts of data and you can also get help in pattern discovery and so on. So for us, you could almost say and it's difficult to put a number on it, you know, but my guess, my best guess would be you're probably 20 times more productive nowadays with the use of various artificial intelligence tools if you do the type of work we do.
Rene:And now comes the but and but, you're not supposed to use, but and you need to be well trained to wield this type of thing because you're suddenly creating huge traps for yourself. You're not creating huge traps for yourself. You're not anchored necessarily in trustworthy data anymore. Your research is prone to hallucination.
Steve:I mean.
Rene:I've seen quotes in my research of a particular Gardner report, mckinsey report and so on, and this was made up. I was then trying toartner report, mckinsey report and so on, and this was made up. I was then trying to find this report and it was, you know, black and white or what is it? Gray on black or whatever. I get back from my prompt, from my AI tools, and it was saying, yes, this is as McKinsey found out in 2022, you know this and the other. And it was not there. It doesn't exist. I called McKinsey. They don't have a report like this.
Rene:So that's part of it. The other part is this kind of how do we get to radical insights, more, you know, sort of outlier views? Artificial intelligence brings you back to the center. There's also things you can do with agent-based systems. Yes, here we get a bit more into technicalities, but it's it's amazing how you can have different ai agents basically challenging one another and getting them to do then reformulations of what you need, etc. Et cetera. So it's really powerful. The same thing. You set this up wrongly. You don't control this anymore and you can be completely wrong, and I think the biggest fear I have is for people who are not even discussing what we are discussing, but which are kind of so untrained or so fresh either to the field or to business in general, just fresh out of grad school, and they think look at this eloquent answer I'm getting here and that must be an eloquent analysis behind it.
Rene:And the opposite is true. There is almost nothing behind, but it sounds great. And they think, okay, I found now, finally, the button which has the answer to all the questions out there and, as opposed to the novel, where the answer to all questions is 42, you know, know, here in the world, the answer to everything you know is right there and seemingly available to everyone. And that's the big paradox Simply also not true. It's not there. But for somebody who is a critical thinker, who understands the strengths and the weaknesses of tools they operate, it's. It's amazing, and that's another end that that I'm feeling very much as an educator is is what we experience with the digital divide. We will now also experience with the ai divide people who use it to great effect, yes, and people who become less and less capable to think for themselves because they're just pressing the button and hope for the best.
Steve:Yeah, there's a few things to unpack in this. Uh, one is let's just start the last thing first is, yes, there will be, I think, three categories of people, uh, non-users, who will fall behind. I just think about changes in technology from, you know, pc-based LAN to local networks, to internet, just evolution, right, the evolution of tools. If you are a marketer, if you don't use social media like you have to, you could be a laggard, absolutely. But eventually your career and your, you know, job options will probably be limited. So there's that kind of non-user don't like it. Then there's I would call the lazy user. I'm trying to turn that. This is completely, I'm just taking off what you're saying, and that person is just taking whatever's in there, not checking sources, not understanding, not doing any synthesis, not using it in the way that could make them a better, a bit more efficient as a worker, just kind of help them with things so that they could focus on heart problems. And then to me there's the power user, there's the effective user, or the effective user, the lazy user, the effective user, the people that understand prompting, they've taken the time to understand the systems, they understand how to use agents or wield the certain tools, but in the end they still are the human right. They still have to do that work and I absolutely see that happening with futures work. It's one thing to just put in, tell me about the future of work or the future of food inside into a GPT right, but it's another thing to feed it data reports, have it do some heavy analysis, to bring things out and ask it harder questions. That would have taken you hours. I'm very excited by agents because I think that it's like the four site team of one. If it can do live scanning, if you can build it to do a lot more of that work. It would take the arduous but you know, still you have to analyze. You can create like your virtual futures team right, you can do things that I think would be effective.
Steve:I'm, I'm, I've used it in sprints for innovation, sprints where I think as an ideation or scenario, if you feed it the right scenario model and you ask it the right questions, it's not about giving you the answer, but I think it gives you what I love about it, even if it's like even sometimes hallucination. It could be like you go, hmm, that's, I never would have thought of that, or the team, kind of sparks other conversation. I think that's fantastic, like that is wild, so if you see it as that in that way. But what it serves it to and kind of coming back to the beginning is ethics.
Steve:Right, is what is we never really talked about? You know, people in these decades never really talked about the ethics, how ethics play a role in corporate foresight, but I think with generative AI, it's going to be, it needs to be a larger part of the conversation. We don't have to, you know, but they're going to have to address it. I don't know how you feel about that, but it's definitely, I think, a conversation that hasn't been had yet, but it's going to have to be.
Rene:Absolutely. I mean I think we have. I mean, I have also another vantage point, which is that I'm also I have a UNESCO chair, so at Context there's a wider network of UNESCO's Futures Literacy Directorate. So this is really all about asking these kind of questions Are people capable of thinking about their own future? Are they able to build agency around? How can I get to this future? And there you often see that something is happening which we call the future is being already colonized by old ideas. So this is really something which you see very strongly today. And this is something which you see very strongly today and this is something which here, when we talk about the power of narratives to bring us to a better place, well, power of narratives is there to bring us to any place.
Rene:So this power which you wield gives you also a lot of responsibility, and whether that responsibility is then being taken up at all times in the right way. This is something which we need to safeguard also to an extent, and so, while I'm very much for innovation and experimentation, this is definitely something where we need also to take it at the pace where we still have some level of control.
Steve:So what's next for you? What's next for Roebuck Hager? What's the next step for you all, because you've had such a wonderful career so far and you're like what's next?
Rene:So for us it's really about helping organizations on two fronts. I mean, one is really to go and conquer new places in their value chain. So it's really about going all the way from foresight to building new markets, building new ventures, new markets, building new ventures. And the second element is what we also work in practice, but also in my academic context, is to say what are these opportunities which are both good business and which are helping to create a positive future. So safeguard the planet, safeguard the people, bring more equality onto this planet. And we feel a certain urgency. So I told you that my center is called the Center for Net Positive Business and you will see me present often with a slide where I put in handwriting this is the Center for the race to net positive business and it's it's not just because I'm looking right now a lot at sailing at the Vendee Globe. I don't know if it's a big thing in the US, but it's a big thing here in France people solo racing once around the globe on sailboats.
Rene:But you know it's, there is urgency. What we look at in our work at the World Economic Forum is positive and negative tipping points. So you can see that we also, as humanity. We will breach and we have already breached six out of nine global boundaries or boundaries in our life support system on our planet, and there is a couple of negative tipping points which could happen with the ice shield in the Arctic, with the tundra which is the permafrost in Siberia, et cetera, and all of this can accelerate global warming to an extent which we cannot even imagine today. So there is a lot of urgency in there and we feel that, as a business school, we have both the obligation but also the capacity to help organizations to accelerate these profitable business models which, at the same time, also help us to safeguard people and planet.
Steve:Fantastic. I mean, you and I have talked about the. We're kind of impatient in the adoption of this field of study. What do you think the next year? Let's just take possible futures. We're not going to do predictions, we don't do predictions, but let's look at the possible future, the next year, couple of years, for the field itself, because the work that we both do, the work that our colleagues do, and, I think, the growing evangelism and understanding of this, what are your, what are your, what are your hopes, what do you, what do you think is, uh, kind of it holds for the, for the, for the field, this these next few years and this morning I just saw something on LinkedIn coming and coming through from from a Swedish colleague of ours who just looked at the trend in search results of the term like foresight or using foresight for future prediction or something like that, and it's increasing nicely.
Rene:And that is not coming as a surprise because people are interested in understanding what can I do to understand this complexity around me, get ready for the future, etc. So that's great news. What we need to now be capable of is scaling also the type of education in the same way and obviously I love people to join our executive education course and we have a really nice program where in six weeks, you know you can come from knowing nothing to the field to understanding hey, what are the core techniques and what are the way you apply foresight to strategy and innovation in an online program. That's great. But at the same time, we said, look, I mean not everyone will come to our executive education activities and we're also going to put something in the public domain out there, together with UNESCO. So we have also a UNESCO MOOC out there and I'm more than happy to share the link also with you listeners.
Rene:Yes, because for me this is a big need which we feel right now, that that we need to be trained. We need to have the same type of language. We need to be able to connect with one another in thinking and acting on on the future we want. So this democratization is something which is urgently needed. We're trying to do what we can do, so we're also scaling it across our programs at the EdEck Business School. We're opening this type of content to many other business schools, we're putting it into the public domain and with that I think we will have more and more people who have the capacity to drive their own and their organization's futures in much more of an agency-driven way.
Rene:We cannot afford that people feel the future is already made. We kind of need to now just live our fate, and we don't have to. We can create our own future. Don't have to. We can create our own future. And we have to and we need to take as humanity, we need to take it back into our own hands just like Gandhi, imagine the future you want to have and make it.
Steve:You just can't let the future happen because there will be bad actors at play and there will be other forces that you, if you knew about them, you could work with it or prevent it, and you know it's very appropriate that you bring that. You bring it up in that way. Yeah, I'm as a communicator in this and a teacher in this. An educator is my goal is a million people Like I want to teach a million people in 10 years.
Rene:That's my yeah, you're doing a great job with your podcast because already that you know is bringing all the facets also out of our field, so that will definitely be also helping us as a community, but also at large Thank you.
Steve:Thank you. I think that the opportunity for us collectively to spread that is there. I think about the evolution of the field. The institutionalizing of it or the incorporation of it maybe is a better term. It allows us to define a common language, get people using it. I think one thing Joe Lepore said a lot of people talk about futures or they say they're futures, but they actually know that there's actual. This is a field of study. You have to learn the tools and the methods. Actually, it's not just saying that's where maybe the future's friendly or the future's fluent that group that I named but actually the practitioner. That's where we have to get people to. How do you wield it in different ways, in new, creative ways? We haven't even thought of Looking back, how do you want the perspective of your career to be remembered and to be looked at? How do you want this kind of the perspective of your career to be remembered and be looked at?
Rene:Like how do you want this kind of the long story of Rene? Well, I think for me it's really about having helped to make it so productive that we, on all levels individual level, organizational level, national level and planetary level take our destiny into our own hands. I think that's a very big thing and I will only be able to contribute to it, but I'm trying to do that through our teaching, through our practice, through our studies, through our benchmarking, and if we can work together on that, I think that's really what we need also to move together in the direction we choose together.
Steve:Thank you so much for the time.
Rene:Yeah, you're welcome.
Steve:It's been great. Thanks a lot, take care.
Rene:Thanks, bye-bye. Thanks for listening to the Think Forward podcast. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at wwwthinkforwardshowcom, as well as on YouTube under Think Forward Show.
Steve:See you next time.
