Do you have enough ideas to plan for the future? The IA Team shares how to use scenario planning to grow your idea bank and your futuristic thinking skills.
Episode Transcript:
If you want to be a futuristic thinker, you also need to be an ideator.
The Innovator’s Advantage book discusses a study that shows it takes 3,000 ideas to come up with one commercially successful idea. While that may feel like a ridiculous amount, without them, you won’t have enough to plan for the future.
To help gather as many ideas as possible, you and your team can use scenario planning. With scenario planning, you create multiple futures to think about and prepare for and ideate around.
In a Utopian scenario, you can forget about any constraints and create a magical future. This is not a future you’ll plan for, but it does help you to imagine an ideal future. The Doomsday scenario is the opposite of Utopia. Consider a situation when everything that could go wrong, does. What would you do? How would you survive it? How would you recreate yourself? The Preferred scenario is what you would like the future to look like within the context of what you think is realistic. And lastly, the Probable scenario is a future based on what’s happening today and what you can anticipate right now.
In developing detailed pictures of each, you’re growing your futuristic thinking skills more and more. And once you need to begin planning for the future, you’ll have a rich background of ideas to pull from.
Learn more about growing your futuristic thinking skills in this 90 Seconds of Innovation series here or by subscribing on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. Tweet your innovation questions to @ebaiya. | Header Photo by Vlada Karpovich via Pexels.
