The future can’t be predicted because there are many possible futures. They can be described and analyzed. FutureScope; is a suite of Forbes Group strategic services designed to help you identify and reach your preferred future. Call us at 941-993-8953 for a quote on any and all of these services. They include:
- Customers’ Customer Analysis – Member needs assessments and customer satisfaction surveys only show how well you performed in the past. They are notoriously poor in advising how you should perform in the future. To create a sustainable future, organizations need to look beyond their customers to their customers’ customers. The forces that drive them drive those who serve them. We examine the changes taking place in the markets in which your organization’s members and customers work. By studying only your members or customers, the very best you can hope for is to react less slowly. But by studying your customers’ customers you can begin to anticipate your customers’ needs and provide valuable market intelligence for them.
- Industry Benchmarking – Many of the problems and challenges facing organizations already have been faced and successfully or unsuccessfully negotiated in other industries and professions. We will examine selected critical trends to determine how other industries and professions have dealt with the same or similar problems. Through this process, we identify successful and unsuccessful strategies and determine the characteristics of winners and losers so you can use them as guidelines for planning.
- Alternative Futures Development – Alternative futures or future scenarios are narratives that describe possible future outcomes. They are based on analysis of trends and research. Scenarios begin at a future point in time and look back to the present as though it were the past. They describe events and time lines that contribute to the future outcomes. Scenarios are different from forecasting, which tends to project the present onto the future and usually is wrong. Scenarios allow you to view several potential futures and identify common events that could cause them to happen and common strategies for addressing the outcomes. This helps prevent you from being blindsided.
- Preferred Future Development – There is a preferred future for your organization. You determine it from possible alternative futures. Once you have defined what it will look like and when you will reach it, you can work back to the present and array the major events in its creation along a timeline. These become your planning objectives.
