Make Your Organization Future Ready

The future will be different from the present- that’s a given. Change is neither negative nor positive, it is a neutral force. The deciding factor is an organization’s ability to survive or thrive in the face of change.

At ClearSky we have created a series of strategic interventions to help organizations navigate the future. The suite of methods, tools and mindsets enable clients to frame their concerns, assess the market and environmental forces affecting their business, identify clear drivers of change and develop strategically compelling scenarios across a 3 to 10 years time frame- these are not predictions, but constellations of possibilities.

We extend the suite by developing indicators that help clients confidently identify scenarios emerging in the given time frame. We also backward engineer steps to arrive at preferred scenarios — bringing organizations the ability to pave their own path to a desired future.

More importantly, Scenario Planning is grounded in Systems Thinking, and acknowledges the interconnectedness between aligned and sometimes conflicting factors across the social, technological, economical, environmental and political dimensions. These are mapped to the organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses. STEEP meets SWOT, leading to a deeply insightful and comprehensive mix of analysis and synthesis.

Our unique approach is shaped by our polymathic experience across management consulting, design leadership, research & development. We employ design thinking frameworks to gather and process insights collaboratively. Business logic is extended with imagination, and we develop detail-rich futuristic scenarios. Business narratives are brought to life by science fiction writers and these future fictions, validated by stakeholders, serve as springboards for strategic planning. For the period of the engagement, we serve as your organization’s Foresight Team. This is what differentiates us from larger consulting firms — we are rigorous, imaginative and agile.

But first, let’s talk about why you should be adding scenario planning to your strategic process.

Why Scenario Planning?

1. Move from being Reactive to Proactive: Exploring the future and planning for it brings situational awareness. You are not caught off guard as Blockbuster was with the advent of Netflix and changing patterns of movie consumption. Organizations can envision change, and become more proactive in addressing challenges and opportunities.
2. Don’t settle for Resilience when you can be Antifragile: Being aware of future possibilities, socio-political and environmental challenges, emerging competition, changing technology and consumption patterns will enable organizations to become more resilient to change. Turn this up a notch by planning for change, and it will be the difference between surviving and thriving in the face of uncertainty. That’s a pretty compelling proposition.
3. Vision Alignment: Plans become actions when everyone agrees on the outcome and the steps to meet it. Scenario planning harnesses the wisdom and experience of a cross-section of teams — gathering insights from resident experts and thought leaders. Leadership works with implementation managers to sort through these insights and develop scenarios they agree on, thus moving with purpose towards a shared vision. This leads to a range of transformative decisions.
4. Preparing for Diversification: Amazon extended its offerings from a retail marketplace to cloud services. Indian Postal Service harnessed the power of its vast network of postmen and post-offices to create a modern payments bank for India’s unbanked billion. Awareness leads to better decisions around optionality.
5. Designing Differentiation: First mover advantage is a direct outcome of preparedness. This amps up even more when you can design differentiation preemptively into your product or strategy. Design your organization for durability.
6. Stabilizing Transformation: Navigating change needs constant evolution and rather than reacting to change, organizations can begin transforming themselves early and gradually — testing and validating initiatives to build strong, scalable foundations with clear vision and purpose
7. Going beyond Extrapolation: The CAGR mindset projects numbers of today into the future in linear ways — that’s an incorrect representation of reality. The future is neither linear, nor equally distributed. A more realistic set of scenarios can be derived from a qualitative approach — human insights, expert reviews, relevant historical research, and identifying drivers of change and indicators of possibilities. This is more representative of the emerging state of the world.

Who will benefit most?

We believe Scenario Planning naturally aligns with requirements of the Financial Services sector. The sector is ripe with opportunities for digital transformation to address the needs of the growing middle class.

It’ll also be very useful for travel, healthcare and education — these sectors are quickly evolving in the post pandemic world, and future readiness is a strategic imperative.

Coupled with climate risk management, Scenario Planning proves to be very useful for city planning, government services and food supply chain management.

At a broader level, trade councils will benefit from Scenario Planning interventions to study the emerging shifts in demand and supply of materials and products mapped against environmental challenges and geopolitics.

What do we offer?

ClearSky brings you 3 levels of scenario development & future forecasting. We are excited to discuss how these offerings pan out for you.

Future is Now

This is a half day real world game that simulates shifts peculiar to your organization and industry. The content of the simulation is customised for you, and helps you assess the future readiness of your organization. This works best with cross-functional participants — 20–30 is a good number. The objective is to quickly adapt to opportunities and challenges and the team that thrives, wins. It’s packed with learning — a rapid assessment of the organization’s transformation capabilities and sensitizing the participants on future thinking.

Scenario Planning

This intervention has a wider scope spread across 6–8 weeks. It is a 6 step process:

1. Framing: We work with the leadership team to identify and articulate critical problem statements.
2. Scanning: We conduct interviews with domain experts, internal and external, to gather signals of change and major uncertainties, and couple that with extensive secondary research.
3. Scenario Creation: We work with cross-functional teams to identify drivers of change and develop 4 critical scenarios.
4. Articulation: These scenarios are turned into compelling narratives by science fiction writers and tell future stories from the perspective of different stakeholders.
5. Validation: The scenarios and narratives are validated by industry experts and stakeholder groups.
6. Indicators: Primary indicators are identified and developed to monitor the emergence of each scenario.

This is a comprehensive analysis of your organization and the industry and can serve as a roadmap for transformation.

Foresight Planning

This layer extends scenario planning to strategic goal setting and roadmapping with the addition of 3 steps:

1. Visioning: Along with the 4 scenarios from before, we help our clients envision, identify and develop a preferable future scenario.
2. Planning: We conduct backcasting exercises with your strategy team to identify the ideal path to this preferred future — processes, people, technology and events and develop a 5 Step Transformation Plan.
3. Acting: The plan is converted into a series of implementation briefs and guiding principles for external partners and internal functions and we enable the organization to take its first step towards future readiness.

This is where the rubber meets the road. We can service your transformation needs with our vast network of high calibre marketing, design and technology partnerships.

You’ve done a commendable job getting your organization to where it is today. And you’ll agree the world can sometimes appear to be BANI- Bitter, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible. Let us help you anticipate the future and prepare for it. I’ll be happy to take you through this in more detail and we can carve out an approach that works best for you and your teams.

Tarun Durga | Founder — ClearSky | tarun@SkiesAreClear.com | +919930709028