Developing a transformative business strategy through the combination of design thinking and futures literacy

ABSTRACT

The paper describes a systematic methodology that combines futures literacy and design thinking to enable the collective discovery of new and disruptive business niches. It is a participatory approach centred on design know-how, which promotes innovative forms of engagement and articulation. The proposed methodology balances experience in designing and applying foresight approaches and futures literacy knowledge labs together with a multidisciplinary understanding of institutional context.

The methodology fosters decision making processes that embrace complexity and treat uncertainty as a resource, thus improving an organisations’ capacity to use the future to expand its understanding of the present. It has been applied at the Center for Strategic Studies and Management (CGEE), an organisation where institutionalised foresight and technology assessment takes place in Brazil, especially in support of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policy design and implementation, as well as evaluation. However, its clients also include different ministries within government and industries alike.

The article outlines the ways in which the organisation involved all its collaborators in jointly rethinking its future, building upon collective intelligence, narrative building, sense making, framing and reframing. The design principles called for these experiments to follow a collective learning curve that enable a renewed focus on systemic and transformative innovation. The crafting of new strategic questions was inspired by jointly expanding the understanding of the imaginary futures of the interrelated systems in which the organisation might play a role. As a consequence, new and disruptive possible roles for the institution were identified. These insights then informed the assessment and choices for the redesign of the business strategy.

This paper presents the methodology for combining design thinking and futures literacy, the application of this methodology to CGEE, and the major findings of the overall exercise. Readers will find out about the impact of this exercise on the organisation’s approach to both its own strategic positioning and to the design and implementation of foresight and strategic studies. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of the proposed methodology for foresight practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Futures literacy and design thinking
• engagement and articulation
• complexity and uncertainty

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first and foremost Riel Miller for the joint work we have been doing during the last years, which enabled the successful design and implementation of the case described here. Also, for your time in revising the paper and giving ideas for improvement. Most of the times I am unsure if the words used here are his or mine.

At the same time, thanks to the dedicated internal project team the exercise was accomplished and attained the expected outcomes. The project has been framed and reframed a number of times to comply with internal demands and this was possible only because of everyone’s involvement in the design, adaptation, implementation and analysis across the project. In this regard, thanks to Adriana Badaró, Alessandra Brandão, Henrique Villa, Mayra Juruá, Ivone de Oliveira, Hartur Setubal, Katia Regina, Flávia Jesini, Marcelo Paiva, Lélio Fellows, Tainá Alves, Rayla Costa, Silvana Rolon and Rafael Benjamin (designer).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Cristiano Cagnin (PhD) is an advisor at the Center for Strategic Studies and Management Science, Technology and Innovation (CGEE) who has previously worked at the EU Commission DG JRC-IPTS as a scientific officer. He is an industrial engineer who has been involved in research, international collaborative projects and consultancy in innovation, business strategy, environment management and cleaner production, and foresight. He is currently engaged in both research and practice concerning sustainable and smart cities as well as in overall sustainability, RTDI and in bridging foresight and anticipation research and practice. He is actively working on national and international projects related to sustainability across diverse thematic areas, RTDI and regional coordination and joint programming, and in supporting policy making through the early identification of weak signals of emerging issues and implications for policy design and implementation. Current research interests include a better understanding of alternative ways of increasing interactions, knowledge development and learning between different social stakeholders as a way to identify and make explicit anticipatory assumptions used to imagine the future and make decisions in the present. The aim is to enable collective intelligence to be unlocked and to identify strategic questions worth probing as a way to enable social actors to both move towards more efficient systems as well as to transform or disrupt such systems. These are key, for instance, to bridge the gap between RTDI and individuals in society, leading thus to more inclusive governance approaches as well as responsible and sustainable ways of innovating, producing, consuming and living.

Notes

1 Walking on two legs refers to the ability to use closed and open systems thinking at the same time. This means being able to detect and invent novelty (innovation as ‘ontological expansion’) using two distinctly different kinds of imaginary future: one in which the model used to imagine the future is constructed with the aim of prediction and the other in which the model is unconstrained by predictive or normative constraints (Miller 2012).