2 Futures Planning and organisational strategy

While having an appreciation of global trends, understanding how the workplace is evolving and thinking about possible futures enables you to broaden your perspective. For most people involved in futures planning, your primary focus will be on solving problems, innovating, and delivering outcomes linked to your organisation’s strategy.

Strategy, according to Davide Sola and Jerome Couturier, ‘is a set of coordinated, creative and sustainable actions (a plan) designed to overcome one or more core challenges that create value’ (Sola and Couturier, 2014). They go on to say these core challenges need to be overcome as they may be preventing you from delivering your ‘higher purpose’, the ‘ultimate goal’, the reason you, your project, your team, or your business exists.

Post the COVID-19 pandemic organisations have had to review their strategies, and how as an organisation they evolve and thrive, in a politically turbulent, financial, and economic uncertain and increasingly insecure world. Widening inequality and external drivers are forcing organisations to rethink their operating models, ways of working, and reconsider their resilience in terms of people, technology, processes, supply chains and impact on the planet.

Futures planning for an organisation is not easy as the further into the future you seek to look, the more uncertainty exists. Couple this uncertainty with external factors outside of your control or influence, and planning becomes even more challenging. Global imperatives, such as the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals, and National initiatives, such as the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act add additional drivers (and potentially constraints) for change to the mix.