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People everywhere wish they could look into a crystal ball and see their future—or at the very least, the future of their investments, business, and career. Frog, the global design consultancy, has developed a technique that’s probably about as close as we’ll get to prophecies told via glass orb. It's called "Futurecasting." With such a forecast in hand, businesses can design to problems or opportunities that are on average about five years out.
1. DEFINE THE TIME FRAME
Before you get going with futurecasting, it’s key to set a time frame. "It's usually not any less than five years. It can be up to 10, 15, even 30 years," says Rhodes. "It depends on the industry, the particular clients, and their needs."
2. DO RESEARCH—AND SPOT WHERE A BUSINESS MIGHT FAIL
Everything about futurecasting is only as good as the research you put into it. So for the futurecasting workshops Frog puts on for clients, the company generally spends a minimum of two weeks just doing research on the future of any given industry—though for large projects and clients, that timeline can quickly balloon to six months.
3. CREATE NEW WORLDS WE MIGHT LIVE IN TOMORROW
Once the research is done, the fun begins. Frog actually spins these trends into archetypal future worlds. The key here is that there’s not just one world it creates. A more likely prospect would be that Frog creates three potential archetypes that it'll use for the rest of the process. Their example for a medical company starts with a broad world label like "Globalized Health Care" or "Transparency as the Norm." Then within each broad label, Frog breaks down three trends that got them to that archetype.
4. HEADLINE FOR THE FUTURE
The worlds are an anchor. But what really brings them to life—and I’d argue creates the real value of futurecasting as a disruption simulator—are what Frog calls "events." Basically, these are hypothetical news headlines that might occur in each of these future realities. Frog's futurecasters write a lot of them, too—as many as 100 for a world. But they’ll narrow them down to a few to focus on the ones that might be the most impactful, or defining, to a company. Imagine a world where Tesla or Uber has developed a self-driving car that’s statistically the safest way to travel, proven to save lives. But culturally, people just don’t see anything wrong with driving their vehicles as they have for 100 years. What would happen then?
5. DESIGN FOR THE OPPORTUNITIES IN THE FUTURE
With these headlines in place, Frog invites companies into its studio to lead brainstorming sessions focused specifically on how their business could or would address these hypothetical events.
"They create a set of ideas of how they're going to react to that possible future," says McKinley. "They prioritize the ones that they think are most interesting for them." Futurecasting at its core essentially lists the problems of the future. So rather than simply iterating a product or service, it’s a way for a company to consider new problems to solve—and maybe even put the early steps into place, preparing to meet those challenges head-on in 5 or 10 years.
"I think one of the things that futurecasting does is helps to open the mind to other longer-term thinking that our brains really haven't evolved to do very well."
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IN BRIEF
- Predictions from the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council, Melanie Walker, say we'll soon enter a post-hospital world due to advances in personalized medicine, health monitoring, and nanotechnology.
- New and evolving technologies in medical science convince Walker we'll live in a society not dependent on hospitals by 2030.
As the world of medicine is increasingly changed by biology, technology, communications, genetics, and robotics, predicting the outlook of the next few decades of medicine becomes harder. But that is exactly what Melanie Walker of the World Economic Forum does, and she predicts a bright new future for healthcare.
As the world of medicine is increasingly changed by biology, technology, communications, genetics, and robotics, predicting the outlook of the next few decades of medicine becomes harder. But that is exactly what Melanie Walker of the World Economic Forum does, “Nearly 20 years ago, when I graduated from medical school, the world of healthcare was dominated by breakthroughs in the field of biology,” Walker said in the article. “But, that is changing quickly because biology is being eaten by robotics and genetics as we evolve deeper into the networked age.”
The lynchpin of Walker’s predictions is the increasing adoption of new healthcare technologies, not just in hospitals but in homes. In fact, she says the rise of personalized medicine means we’re moving from hospitals to “home-spitals.”
We can already see these trends playing out. Many of the biggest diseases are largely vascular, and better understanding is making them more predictable and preventable. Accidents are likely to fall with the advent of automation and driverless tech and regenerative medicine is already stretching the lifespans in the most advanced countries. Improvements in health monitoring will also make doctor’s visits rarer since they’ll acquire health data from your smartphone. And scanning technology will one day create devices that combine spectroscopy, magnetic resonance, and radiation in an all-in-one scanner.
The trend also points to less intrusive and more automated surgeries and operations. Microbots will perform surgeries from inside your body and ingestible robotics will diagnose or operate on you before they dissolve. There’ll also be an end to organ waiting lists. Advancements in 3D printing have made great leaps in printing artificial organs, bones, and even tissue.
This isn’t a prediction designed to be 100 percent as new advancements and discoveries are made every day. Rather, the predictions help set us on a path to advance the regulatory structure to accommodate future advances and get funding towards the right fields to achieve this vision.
Several years ago while I was in Amsterdam, I spent time with Thomas Marzano, head of design for brand, communication and digital at Philips. There, I learned about a process that complements customer journey mapping while allowing strategists across the enterprise to think more holistically and more so, experientially. Beyond journey maps lie many options for experience design. In this case, I want to share with you the practice of what Philips calls “experience flows.”
A "customer journey map" got us to walk in our customer’s shoes. "Experience flows" typically outline customer steps before, during and after transactions.
An experience flow seamlessly brings together all of the experiences throughout the infinity loop of customer engagement. It distills all of the both qualitative and quantitative information you have collected about the customer experience into a large poster, which is designed to make immediate sense to everyone around the company involved with experience design.
In many ways, experience flows are a visual interpretation of human-centered design approaches that we see in design thinking or more so in the work of IDEO combined with idealistic customer journey maps that don’t yet exist to their full potential.
How to design experience flows
Frame the project: clearly define who the target group of customers is, and also describe the business objectives, challenges, timing, the core team and the deliverables.
Pinpoint the purpose of creating the flow.
Step 1: Develop an outline for an experience flow
Create the experience framework: this is a rough initial mapping of the current nature of the experience based upon your existing knowledge, for which you could us one of the customer mapping styles. Gather user insights: research customer psychographics, demographics, preferences, expectations and aspirations.
Step 2: Create the flow
Map the experience: this is where team members review all of the research, identify patterns and insights about customer needs and desire, with the purpose being to identify opportunities for improving experiences and creating whole new ones.
Draft issue cards: here, team members extract all key issues that they’ve made note of and write them down onto issue cards, one issue per card.
Develop personas: you have different types of people who share common interests, behaviors, aspirations, etc. Capture and define each persona. Bring these characters to life.
Create stakeholder maps: this simple map shows how different types of people involved in an experience interact with one another in the setting of the experience.
Step 3: Explore solutions
Host an opportunity workshop: gather people from the different departments together to discuss the issues on the cards and search for ways to address them.
Embark on an ideation journey: here, you invite people from outside the company and industry to meet with the team and examine each opportunity to surface even more ideas. The team records all of the ideas from these sessions and then creates scenarios and storyboards to envision how they would work in real life.
Get feedback: the next step is to test ideas with real people. The purpose is to get input fast to allow the team to iterate and improve on the solutions.
Illustrate the experience flow: at this point, the team is able to visualise a full experience around the new solution or solutions. You put the persona at the center and all describe all experiences.
In an experience economy, experiences are not to be left to chance. They require intention, thoughtfulness and design. Experience flows open the door to experience architecture and a more granular form of experience mapping that goes further and broader than the more traditional tools that are currently trending.
It is almost second nature to create stereotypes of people based on age. If someone is in their twenties then they must be technologically adept, obsessed with keeping fit, prepared to change jobs frequently while obviously searching for meaningful work. Those in their sixties and seventies must be less interested in work and are probably exhausted and anticipating the leisure time offered by a long retirement.
These are seductive and easy to understand behavioral labels. But are these assumptions either real or helpful? Might they obscure even more important similarities?
To understand how people are responding to this transformation in their working lives, we developed a survey completed by more than 10,000 people from across the world aged 24 to 80.
We found far fewer differences between the age groups than we might have imagined. In fact, many of the traits and desires commonly attributed to younger people are shared by the whole workforce. Why might this be the case?
While there may be some selection bias — the 10,000 people who completed our survey online are already interested in the topic of life and work changes — their experiences and attitudes highlight how misleading simple age related stereotypes can be.
- It is not just the young who are investing in new skills.
We asked people whether they felt their skills and knowledge had plateaued, and whether they had recently made an investment in their skills. After the age of 30 many people are concerned about plateauing skills. What is fascinating is how many people were countering this by actively investing in their skills. Certainly a higher proportion of those aged 18-30 (91%) and 31-45 (72%) felt they were investing in new skills but after the age of 45 almost 60% of all ages said they were actively investing. - It is not just the young who are positive and excited by their work.
What was striking was that whatever their age, those feeling positive about their work was a constant at just over 50%. Just as striking is the proportion of people of all ages who don’t feel positive about their work. - Older people are working harder to keep fit.
About half of those under 45 actively try to keep fit, rising continuously across the ages with a peak of 71% for those aged over 70. - Older people are not more exhausted.
One of the reasons corporations often prefer the young to the old is the assumption that with age comes exhaustion at work and therefore a lowering of productivity. We found no evidence of this age related exhaustion. In fact, more people under the age of 45 (43%) said they were exhausted than those over 45 (35%) – the least exhausted are those over 60. - Older people don’t want to slow down.
More than half of those aged 46 to 60 want to slow down, while only 39% of the people over 60 and less than 20% of the people over 70 say they want to slow down. - Exploring is not just for the young.
When you think about “gap years” you probably think about 20-year-olds taking time out after full-time education. Crucially, we found no significant age difference in people’s excitement about exploring their options.
When corporations believe that older workers invest less in their knowledge, are less excited by their work and exploring their world, and are on a path to physical decline and exhaustion, they make the wrong decisions about whom to select, promote and develop, and whom to retire.
As every one of us is faced with living and working longer it is absolutely crucial that, whatever our age, we face up to and question unfounded assumptions and stereotypes about ourselves and about others.
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