Facing Our Futures
How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating insight into how professionals and businesses can develop their foresight and strategy to ensure that they are prepared for an unpredictable future.
Businesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events.
In Facing Our Futures, Nikolas Badminton draws upon his decades of experience as a consultant and futurist to provide readers with the skillset and outlook they need to prepare their organization, team and themselves for whatever obstacles the future may hold. CEOs, executive teams, government leaders and policy makers need to gain a broader perspective and a firmer grasp on how their relevant industry, society or community is evolving and changing. Once they have acquired this foresight, they need to then discover how to fully harness it – by strengthening their foundations, forecasting and establishing a resilient and adaptable strategy.
Facing Our Futures acts as a primer on the value of seeing how bad things can get and the power in imagining these futures. It also provides a proven strategic planning and foresight methodology - the Positive Dystopia Canvas (PDC) - that allows leaders to supercharge their teams to build evocative visions of futures that strengthen planning today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This dry debut from Badminton, a business consultant and "Chief Futurist" at Futurist.com, offers advice on how to "open our eyes and minds to the possibilities for many futures and new ways of operating in the world... to address the biggest challenges we face." He details his 10-step "Positive-Dystopia Framework," which aims to help organizations think through possible challenges by deciding what principles matter to them and evaluating how to respond to burgeoning social or economic trends, but the convoluted explanation of this approach befuddles; for example, it's unclear how step seven's instruction to formulate "what if" statements differs from the first step of coming up with hypotheses to contemplate. Elsewhere, Badminton outlines strategies others have developed for considering potential outcomes, such as futurist Charles Taylor's "Cone of Possibilities," which visualizes prospects by arranging them from preposterous to probable. To prepare for the future, Badminton suggests businesses establish Chief Futurist positions and encourages readers to adopt "future consciousness" by practicing self-awareness, creativity, and "realistic idealism." Unfortunately, his ambitions are stymied by dull, plodding prose that fails to meet its goal of inspiring readers, and the Positive-Dystopia Framework is too complicated to be useful. This comes up short.
