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Hybrid working: planning for the future
Hybrid working: planning for the future

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1 Future possibilities

To start this course, we want to move away from thinking specifically about your own organisational internal and external environments. Instead, we want you to consider what the future could be like and to encourage you to be open to possibilities and uncertainties. This first section aims to enable you to feel comfortable with the fact that you may have questions you may think you should know the answer to, and don’t. Futures planning often involves unknowns and idea that may seem impossible. The course has been designed to help you to manage unknowns more effectively and the later sections become more structured as we explore futures planning in detail.

Activity 1 Reflect on the past and think about the future

Timing: 10 minutes
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Figure 1 Sultan the Pit Pony sculpture in south Wales
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Aerial view of a public earthwork of a pit pony above a closed coal mine.

Figure 1 Sultan the Pit Pony sculpture in south Wales

Watch the video ‘Sultan the Pit Pony’ below. Reflect on the past and think about future, both from a personal and organisational perspective.

Then make a note of how you imagine the future.

BBC Wales - The Slate, Sultan the Pit Pony [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]

Video 1 Sultan the Pit Pony

Answer

It may have seemed strange to have been asked to watch a video about a sculpture dedicated the memory of pit ponies and coal mines. Many of us may be too young to remember the scale of the coal industry in Britain, as importing from overseas became more cost effective from the 1970s British coal mining started to rapidly decline. At its peak in the 1920-30’s it may have been unimaginable for those involved in the industry that this was an energy source in the future we would actively decide to stop using. As we came aware on the impact it had on our climate the focus on long-term energy sources is a fundamental part of futures planning, to find more sustainable ways of working and ensure we meet the net-zero climate targets.

While you may not be directly involved in finding the solution for cleaner energy resources, your vision of the future is dependent on energy in some form. The purpose of the video was to redirect your thinking from your own understanding of the world and technology. Often when you are asked to imagine the future the first reaction is to talk about technology. The video highlighted the human impact of an evolving world and as future planners you have to balance both organisational and people’s needs. This requires you to be open to collaborating with others and to draw on examples from other industries and areas of work. It also requires you to become comfortable managing uncertainty and to imagine the unknown and maybe impossible, in order to develop your own sense-making skills and assist in the evolution of your organisation.

The future possibilities for the world are infinite, and as an organisation predicting your own role in that future and how you continue to succeed, will either be an exciting or daunting prospect. For some this may feel overwhelming as, for most organisations, your focus is often on the immediate needs to survive and operate. Others may be fortunate to have Futures and Innovations, or Research and Development teams, but many rely on the knowledge, experience and enthusiasm of those in the workforce tasked with planning, implementing and sustaining change.

In the previous activity you considered the future. We now explore the idea of a futurist mindset.

Activity 2 Do you have a futurist mindset?

Timing: 10 minutes

In the video below Jacob Morgan, four times best-selling author, speaker and professionally trained futurist explains the futurist mindset.

As you watch the video, consider how you think about the future and when working on tasks, consider how you approach these – do you think about different possibilities? Then answer the poll.

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Transcript: Video 2 The skills of the futurist

JACOB MORGAN:
Another one of the important skills that leaders need to practice and embrace is the skill of the futurist. And futurists don't predict the future. A futurist simply helps make sure that you're not surprised by what the future might bring. And I like to use the analogy of chess. You can probably tell I love chess. There's these chess pieces behind me. And one of the things that separates really good chess players is that they have the ability to think in terms of scenarios and possibilities.
So if you've ever played chess or, for example, any other kind of board game as well, you know that one of the things that really helps is your ability to think in terms of these scenarios and possibilities. Now, let's take chess as a specific example. In the game of chess, whenever you make a move, you're constantly thinking, well, how might my opponent respond?
If I move my pawn, my opponent can move their bishop. They can move their knight. They can move their pawn. Maybe they can move their queen. And if they do one of those things, here's how I'm going to respond. In other words, you're thinking of those different scenarios and possibilities all the time.
Interestingly enough, this was ranked as the number one skill for current and aspiring leaders according to the 140 CEOs that I interviewed. And it's precisely because we live in a world that is changing so quickly that we are often times very obsessed and focused on one path and going down that only path.
And when problems arise, and when we get derailed, our mentality is, no, nothing is going to stop us. Keep ploughing ahead, even though everyone else around you is looking at you going like, that's probably not the best approach because we don't think oftentimes in terms of those scenarios and possibilities.
Funnily enough, we do a pretty good job of thinking like this in our personal lives. Think about the time when you went on a first date or when you bought a house. Your first date, you're immediately thinking, how is this person going to respond in a difficult situation? Can I spend the rest of my life with this person? Can I have kids with this person? Can I bring this person home to my parents? And you already start going through these scenarios and possibilities, same thing when you buy a house. Is the value going to go up or down? What's going to happen to the schools? You think about the future and all of these different options.
But at work, as soon as you show up to the office, you're kind of just smacked in the face with, here respond to this email. Do this task. Do this project. Go talk to this person. And that thinking, that part of our brain just shuts down. And we're just focused on to do list, task, task, task, task, check off, check off, check, and that's it. And that thinking like a futurist is completely-- it just doesn't happen inside of our organisations, which is pretty scary when you think about that.
So the skill of the futurist is really about asking four questions on a regular basis. And if you can implement and ask these four questions, I think that it will teach you how to embrace this skill. You can ask these questions for big decisions, or you can ask them for smaller things that you're trying to consider.
So the four questions are, number one is why might this happen? So regardless of what you're pondering, ask yourself, what would cause this to happen? Why might this happen? Second question, what else might happen? So what's another scenario that might arise? Third question to ask yourself is, what are some of the factors that are going to influence or that could influence why something will or will not happen?
In the last question, which I think is the most important one, which is, what do you want to happen? This is the one that oftentimes people forget to ask. We oftentimes say things like, what is the future of work?
But the reality is that we should be asking, what is the future of work that you want to see happen?
Because otherwise, you put yourself in a very passive role. It's as if something is going to happen to you, and all you can do is just kind of brace for impact.
But the reality is that you have an active role to create and design in shape what the future and what the future of work is going to look like. So you have to ask yourself, what do I want the future to look like? And how am I going to build that future? And I think if you can start to embrace these four questions on a regular basis, you will inherently start to embrace this skill of the futurist.
End transcript: Video 2 The skills of the futurist
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Video 2 The skills of the futurist
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Do you feel you have a futurist mindset?

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Answer

Having a futurist mindset draws on many skills and approaches you may already use, but perhaps you have not considered that on daily basis you do futures planning in your approach to everyday tasks and decisions. These include the act of considering possibilities, exploring options and asking questions such as those Jacob Morgan posed in the video:

  • Why might this happen?
  • What else might happen?
  • What factors may influence it happening/not happening?
  • What is the future of work that YOU want to see happen?