It’s a simple process, easily replicable for any company for their long-range planning cycle or even to define short-term strategic priorities. It can be the subject of a team-building activity or –like I’ve done this year- involve a broad audience within the company.
Basically there are 4 steps in the process:
1. Selection of trends to include
This is perhaps the hardest part, since it is very difficult to avoid being influenced by the limits of your company’s business environment. The Megatrends exercise can only realize its full potential if you look much broader than that environment. Instead of just looking for trends that have an immediate impact on your industry, one should look for deeper underlying societal, political or even psychological changes that will affect society as a whole.
For this year’s exercise I’ve selected 24 trends based on what a range of professionals, economists, futurists and consultancies define as Megatrends (McKinsey, Ernst & Young, The Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, etc.). When cleaning the redundancies, I ended up with 24 trends that could be categorized into 6 ‘themes’:
Don’t take these for granted. This is a consensus-based list, but one could easily come up with a different set of trends, dependent on which angle you depart from (for instance, if one would have taken a psychological approach, the list would have featured trends like ‘search for meaning’, ‘feeling of solitude’, etc.).
2. Discuss trends internally in ‘Think Tanks’ meetings
The practical organization of these Think Tanks could obviously take any form possible. What I have done is set up one Think Tank per ‘theme’, and lead discussions on the trends within each theme in a 3 hour session.
More importantly, however, is who you invite in these Think Tanks. It is quite important to have people from different backgrounds, different expertise, and different interests.
Ideally a Think Tank contains of 4-5 people with a good balance between genders, levels of seniority and professional background.
TIP 1: Prepare some ‘fact sheets’ about the trends you want to cover. Send these about one week before the meeting to have people start thinking about them. These ‘Fact Sheets’ should contain some graphical ‘proof of point’ of that trend, some general introduction and 2-3 key questions which need to be addressed in the Think Tank session.
TIP 2: Use a template with the key areas you’d like to cover in the Think Tanks, take notes on this template so that everyone can see them (this will stimulate interaction and generate new ideas with the attendees.
There are plenty of other techniques you can use in order to stimulate the ideas and maximize the level of engagement of your Think Tank participants. The choice, however, will be dependent on the exact nature of the meetings and groups (I had to run mine virtually, which somewhat poses a challenge in using these techniques).
3. Build conclusions and recommendations.
This is my favorite part, since it’s a tremendous challenge to make sense of all the discussions you had in the think tanks. You need to make a selection from all the ideas and thoughts the discussions have generated, and you need to condense and summarize them into impactful, short messages.
Some techniques and tools have helped me out hugely with this.
One example is the use of ‘heat maps’: Most of you would probably know how to do this automatically using Excell. Basically I listed the different trends horizontally and vertically the areas of which I wanted to study the impact of the trends on (in my case: our customer segments).
I then just had to give ‘scores’ for opportunities and/or threats in order to build a summary view like this one: (dummy data)
This is obviously not rocket science, but it helped me greatly to single out the most impactful messages.
Another good practice is to map the different trends and see how they interrelate with each other. The software that I use for that is called Cayra and can be downloaded for free on CNET (http://download.cnet.com/Cayra/3000-2076_4-10777905.html ).
But ultimately you want to conclude whether or not a trend will affect your business, and whether ot not you should take action on it. The best way to do that is by segmenting the trends. This can be done, for instance, by mapping the threat and opportunity level of each trend, like hereunder.
Last but not least, I would strongly encourage you to read through a couple of books about megatrends –or read the book reviews of the books that I read on this blog.
4. Communicate, influence
Impossible to give some standard recommendation about this phase, as this is obviously dependent on how strategy is dealt with in your company. One observation nevertheless: it is worthwile to communicate the final document broadly within the company, for Sales managers to better comprehend the challenges of their customers, or for you executives to argument some strategic decisions, or for any other purpose.
What I typically do is to produce a pack with all the ‘fact sheets’ and a summary of the findings of each trends, to be distributed widely across the organization. Next to that, I typically provide an ‘executive brief’ discussing the threats, opportunities and new business ideas that the exercise has generated. This briefing document is sent only to the strategic community in my company.
The aim of this article was to show that introducing a ‘Megatrend’ exercise in your company is easy and useful. By preparing for the future now, you can ensure your company’s success for the many years to come.
I hope you found this stimulating and useful, but if this article left you with unanswered questions, feel free to contact me (fredericdemeyer@hotmail.com).
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