How well is your company prepared for the future? ... and your competitors?

How confident are you that your company will survive the next decades? …

and your competitors? 

Admittedly, these are tough questions. At first they might even look like impossible to answer. After all, is the future not a big unknown?

Not necessarily… there are some things we can be pretty sure of. The combination of the ageing population and the coming of GenY workers will worsen the talent gap, for instance. The climate is definitely changing and, even if there’s discussion on how dramatic the change will prove to be, it will certainly require companies to adapt. There are indeed a couple of things we can be certain of for the next two decades.

So the big question is: are you prepared for this future? And are your competitors better prepared than you?

Knowing this is crucial the ensure your competitiveness in the (near) future. And it’s relatively easy to build such a benchmark:

• Take +/- 20 metrics around a couple of megatrends themes;
• Look for evidence of yourself or your competitors in how companies are preparing (if at all) for these issues;
• Put some scoring together and build recommendations. 

The benchmark we developed at the Institute for Future Insights, for instance, contains 24 metrics grouped around 6 topics:

Scoring how well you and your competitors are doing in these fields can be based on publicly available information of these companies. It is pretty time- consuming, but highly rewarding: the conclusions that can be drawn from this exercise for your future strategy are quite substantial. For instance, you could map out the strengths and weaknesses of your company in comparison to your competitors in a number of areas:

As said, this is an easy but time consuming exercise. But it leads to very practical, concrete recommendations. Go through this sample report to find out:

Future Readiness Benchmark sample report

View more documents from Frederic De Meyer

If you need some help building the benchmark for your company or performing it altogether (which guarantees a neutral look at the information at hand), feel free to contact me.