Back to Blog
From futures literacy to strategic foresight
We wanted to understand and find bottom-up practices, actions and attitudes for how you and me, or Jane/John Doe, consider futures in our daily decision and actions at work - futures literacy as we call it in our freshly published report.
Futures thinking and doing is a fundamental skill set for any employee now and in the future. Companies cannot afford to delegate the contents and outcomes of the future-proofing exercises to a few experts and top leadership alone.
We made a study to explore the topic further and here are some of our findings:
When is the ‘future’ and how can we work on it?
- Only 15% in our survey think beyond 5 years in their daily work.
- Those at disruption risk think further into the future.
- Smaller companies (< 250 employees,) were more active with idea testing, data forecasting and risk mitigation.
What are futures made of and by whom?
- In general, now is the era of the individual thinker and how they make us see the future.
- As could be anticipated, leadership (55,6%), technology (44,4%) and business (42,2%) promote futures in the organizations – with R&D and innovation only in fourth place (33,3%).
- In the bottom 3 of promoting the future are HR (6,7%) and Risk, Quality & Legal (4%).
What is the value of the future?
- Futures thinking is considered difficult, because it involves dealing with complex systems and processes that can seem impossible to map.
- Yet, 95% of survey participants sees that futures thinking is an extra gear to perform better.
Find out more insight and how to shift the bigger gear on from the study report.
Petri RikkinenEmerging business & culture initiatives
