Navigate a Challenging Business Environment and Stay Ahead of Your Competition

When facing a challenging business environment, which these days is true for almost every industry, companies don’t always have the time to make considered decisions. Agility has become a much-needed skill.

So, how can companies be better prepared for whatever the future holds?

Agility needs preparation and with this in mind, most major organisations conduct some sort of societal trend following in the hope that they will correctly “guess” what might happen. You may be one of them. So it might surprise you that I believe this is a huge mistake, especially if you think that trends alone will better prepare your organisation!

Think about it. Most companies follow the same trends, attend the same trend “shows” & conferences, and get the same or at least very similar reports.

This results in them all working on the same ideas and concepts, and eventually launching very similar products and services or campaigns, that struggle to compete effectively.

Have you never wondered why suddenly everyone is talking about a certain topic, using similar slogans, or launching equivalent offers? Now you know why!

Here’s how to avoid this and develop a powerful competitive advantage.

Market Evidence

I want to start by sharing just one example of the problem I just mentioned. A few years ago, we started seeing many companies using the idea of “YES” and “NO” in their advertising. In Europe, these included:

The Swiss Migros Bank: see the videos here – only in French & German, I’m afraid but still easy to understand whatever language you speak.
Coke’s “Say Yes to Love” campaign.

BMW 320i Campaign YES YOU CAN

These are just three examples from very different industries, but I’m sure there are many others in your own country. (If so, please share the example in the comments below.)

Clearly, the trend for more independence and freedom has been emphasised in all three organisations mentioned above. Perhaps they are working with the same trend or advertising agency? Or maybe they are buying the same external trends report. It certainly looks like it, doesn’t it?

Companies that develop concepts based upon this type of external resource alone can find themselves in a race to be the first to market when using the ideas these reports suggest.

Incidentally, it is not always best to be the first when introducing new concepts to consumers, especially when they require learning new ways of thinking or working.

So what can you do about it? The vital step that many – dare I say most – organisations don’t take, is to turn the trends they are following into plausible future scenarios.

Scenario planning ensures original thinking from which proprietary ideas are conceived, and takes the development of new concepts in-house, where it belongs.

Then, the new product and service concepts, the new advertising campaigns, and the new promotions that are designed are unlikely to be the same as those of the competition and will, therefore, have a greater chance of success.

Turning Trends into Future Scenarios

Organisations working with progressed trends have generally established their own process for turning trends into future scenarios. They all follow a similar pattern to the ten-step process summarised below:

Recruit a diverse team of internal experts from different areas, levels, and cultures from within the company. This is a vital first step. You need different perspectives to identify the impact of trends on the organisation.
List the major questions management is asking about their future business.
Choose the most important trends for the category, brand or area under review. A useful process to follow is using the STEEP ones (social, technological, economic, environmental, political).
Extend each trend into the distant future, five to ten years, is my recommendation.
Collide the resultant developed trends to produce leading possible changes.
Note the major forces that come into play as a result of each of these changes.
Agree on the two most critical forces, and use them as axes to create the four future worlds you will consider the scenarios.
Identify either the most likely of the four and fully develop this world, or summarise the four worlds and their major similarities and differences.
Develop stories to transmit the impact on the business should each (or a part of) the scenario happen. Prioritise the decisions that management must now face to prepare the business.
Plan how markets will identify the most likely scenario for them and follow the relevant trends in order to be best prepared.

This ten-step process can be followed during a two or three-day workshop, or over a longer period of development lasting several weeks or even months.

With my clients, I tend to prefer the latter. It gives everyone sufficient time to contemplate possible impact scenarios, as well as those developed the necessary time to fully mature.

For a more detailed review of this 10-step process, you might like to check out this post: The Great Trends Hoax: They Don’t Give a Business a Competitive Advantage.

If you’d like some support the first time you run through these ten steps, book a QC2 Review Session, and we’ll make sure you get some atomic steps that will deliver quantum growth. Your organization’s success could be waiting at the end of that call.

Success Factors of Scenario Planning

The ten-step process mentioned above will ensure you make the right review. Also, by involving a diverse group of people in the creative task, you get the needed differing perspectives.

However, from taking clients through the process, I believe a number of additional criteria need to be met to guarantee that your future scenario planning exercise is a total success. These include:

Choose members for your internal team who are enthusiastic and curious about future changes within their division, category or business area. You need enthusiasm and energy to make the future scenario planning sessions fun and appealing.
Assign or hire an excellent creative moderator to lead the process. Using someone from outside the company helps to push thinking far beyond the internal comfort zone.
Ensure executive management sponsorship of the exercise as well as its outcome and, most importantly, their pre-agreement to own the resulting scenarios. In fact, scenario planning is aimed at helping top management make plans for the future of the business, so their consensus is essential.
Being able to turn future scenarios into compelling narratives and use story-telling to ignite change within the organisation. By bringing the scenarios to life, people can more easily consider the impact on the business and prepare appropriate actions.
For regional and global organisations, having sufficient resources to share the scenarios with all markets is essential. It is important to engage their commitment to the continued measurement of the trends in their own businesses, as well as the sharing of their learnings with other markets on a regular basis.

Following the process summarised above and including all five of the additional criteria mentioned provides the greatest chance of success in building plausible future scenarios that can be implemented by your business.

If you have never done a scenario planning exercise before, it may seem daunting, at least at first. Therefore, having an experienced external guide to support you throughout the process makes sense.

These are some thoughts on the importance of scenario planning and how to get started, based on my own experience working with many of the major Fortune 500 companies. I would love to hear your own thoughts on the best way to get a company to move from trend following alone to the more impactful and profitable process of future scenario planning.