Article written by Frederic De Meyer
– Trends series, article 3 –
There are plenty of ways you can study megatrends and draw conclusions for your company’s future strategic direction. However, there is no miracle way. I have been running this exercise for 3 years at my former employer Cisco Europe, and ended up making the distinction of 5 crucial steps in the process:
- Make a selection of trends to use for your strategic exercise
- Discuss the selected megatrends in ‘think tanks’ including internal (and perhaps external) people
- Summarize and draw conclusions from the discussions
- Present to executives and make decisions
- Extensive communication internally and externally
This looks simple enough. But, as always, the devil is in the detail. So here are a couple of tricks to make this exercise a centerpiece for a successful strategic exercise:
- When selecting trends to assess don’t be limited to these trends with an obvious impact on your industry. Think broad!
- Organize ’think tanks’ to discuss the impact of megatrends on your company
- Invite 4-6 people to these think tanks
- Make sure to include people with different backgrounds and levels of seniority to the think tanks
- For the discussions, schedule about 30-45 minutes per megatrend
- Structure the discussions, but you don’t necessarily have to stick to the structure
- Send a simple but thought-provoking briefing document to the participants (one fact sheet per megatrend)
- Use the conclusions of the discussions to communicate to various stakeholders
- Have fun! Obviously this is a serious exercise, but from my own experience I learned that people are very grateful to be asked to discuss the ‘bigger picture’ of your company
I wish you all a fruitful megatrend exercise. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss further.
