There are probably thousands of ways you can assess and show the impact of a megatrend on your company’s opportunities and threats. Obviously the easiest one is to have a discussion about the megatrends during a coffee-break, but chances are that no impactful action plan will result from it.
Clearly you need to have some ideas and conclusions on paper, in order to define a common view on the opportunities and threats of the megatrends within the company. Again there are many ways of doing this, but probably the simplest one is to develop ‘Heat Maps’ for each megatrend. All it requires is some internal discussions and a couple of clicks on Excel’s ‘conditional formatting’ feature. As the example beneath shows, this provides an easy-to-understand, quick overview of where the trends affect your business or your customers.
There are different viewpoints you can develop here: a company-centric or a market-centric one. In the company-centric view you can make a list of all the stakeholders of your company and assess the impact of a megatrend on each one of them. In the market-centric view, you’d look at your market segments and assess the impact of the megatrend on them. Needless to say that both lists will be different dependent on your line of activity, your company size or the geographies you serve. For instance, a B2C company might want to define ‘the market’ in terms of consumer segments rather than in terms of industries.
In the examples beneath I took the trend of water scarcity as a basis. According to the International Water Management Institute, this problem will become acute as from 2025, even in Europe –see graphic beneath. This will likely have an impact on geopolitical balances, increasing global risk and tensions. Future wars are likely to be fought over water rather than oil (this is a prediction, not a trend).
1. The impact on your company
In order to show how this exercise can be different dependent on the industry you’re in, I assessed the impact the water scarcity might have on three completely different types of companies: (1) a global ICT company, (2) a local Retailer and (3) and international Transport company. In the example beneath, green stands for opportunity, red for a threat.
You will see that the potential impact of water scarcity leads to a completely different conclusion for the three types of companies.
Important to note: the example beneath is a product of my own thinking. I can’t stress enough the importance of having a group/team discussion within the company (preferably with an external person assisting) in order to come up with a better, consensus-based view.
2. Impact on your market
Another way to look at it is to assess the impact a trend has on your (potential) customers, on your ‘market’. Hereunder I tried to assess the impact of water-scarcity on a number of industries, but obviously you’d need to adapt this to the customer segments you are serving.
And again, this view can only be finalized after in-depth internal discussions in your company, the view beneath reflects my personal view and only serves as an example.
The aim of this article is to show that there are easy ways to discuss the impact of megatrends on your company, and draw some strong and lasting conclusions from these discussions using simple techniques like ‘Heat Maps’. Putting the conclusions of the discussions in such a way makes it easy for everyone to understand and communicate, plus it makes it easy to get back to the conclusions at regular intervals (yearly) to keep the discussion alive! After all the ‘Megatrend’ exercise is a team-building exercise as well…
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