Designing strategies from the perspective of the future (instead of the past): foresight is a key success factor for companies.
Over the past few weeks we have had the opportunity to speak with more than 50 HR professionals about the importance of adopting a foresight approach to guide actions in the present and near future.
We did this, as HR Intelligence, during two events designed and carried out four hands with SCS Consulting, in Bologna and Milan, in March and April, respectively.
We did it during a Virtual Workshop facilitated by Barbara Valentini, co-founder of HR Intelligence, in the second half of April.
We do it (increasingly frequently) as part of the projects we are conducting with our clients, introducing visions of possible futures into strategic reflections .
Human Resource Management: the vision of “possible futures”
The most significant comments we collected from the HR involved allow us to highlight a few key points:
- we are not used to (or even trained in) thinking about futures. It is an untrained form of thinking and therefore difficult to approach, which also makes one feel a bit uncomfortable
- once you embark on the path of visions of possible futures as a key to anticipating choices in the present, it opens up very important spaces of insight, which sometimes make you feel a little inadequate about the way you are handling your priorities
- a thinking about futures enables the strategic plan to be enriched: we combine the experience of the past and the pressures of the present, with the ambitions we want to place on futures, to build our visions of futures, choose our desirable future, and act right now to realize it.
Forecasting and Foresight: what are the differences?
When we talk about futures, it is useful to distinguish the concept of Forecasting from the concept of Foresight.
Forecasting looks predominantly at the short-term future, assumes substantial continuity with respect to the present, and allows work on risk perimeters (particularly high-impact, high-probability events)
Foresight looks at an intermediate time window, assumes discontinuity from the present, and rests on the concept of Uncertainty. It suggests working on high-impact and highly uncertain scenarios.
HR Management: foresight and the impact of new technologies.
Working with futures presupposes adopting specific methods for hr management. But not only that. When we work with foresight we must adopt a specific cognitive posture (our minds struggle to conceive of the future other than a linear projection of the present).
Regarding methods, in the activities we conducted, we used:
- the strategic interview
- the environmental scan
- the Futures Wheels
- the Back-casting
…but also the exploration of the 14 JRC mega trends in the Relevance – Awareness & consequences matrix.
Each of these methods deserves a closer look (which will not be missed in future articles).
In recent weeks, in particular, with foresight we have explored the topic related to the impact of technologies, AI first and foremost, on professional skills and knowledge management.
What is surprising (but should not be surprising…) is that technological evolution and releases of AI-based solutions have a super-exponential speed, which threatens to become “paralyzing” for a function such as HR, which is questioning how to keep up with what is happening, considering its “usual” timeframe for addressing reskilling campaigns, analyzing organizational impacts, rethinking operational processes, and performing all the activities proper to HR management.
In this context of exponential acceleration of the technological trend, and pervasive scenario uncertainty,stepping out of “business as usual” and adopting a foresight perspective allows directing effective and anticipatory actions. Otherwise, one will continue to work reactively and – by definition – slowly, missing the opportunity to play a strategic role instead.
That’s why we are talking about it, that’s why we insist: today it is necessary, for HR to adopt a foresight perspective, an exploration of futures in an intermediate time window in which to consider the driver of uncertainty as a guideline, in the light of which to reconsider its strategic agenda, but also its operational processes, priorities, resource allocation.
As has been the case in the past on other topics (introduction of data-driven decision making for HR, for example), we have strong convictions and we make them available to those who – reading – feel that vague sense of inadequacy in always going over basically the same agenda, the same processes, the same paradigm, in a world that is laying the groundwork for possible completely different labor market futures.
Adopting a foresight approach is about reprogramming the actions of the present to build the future we desire.
Do we really still think this is not a priority?
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