Futurist

Futurist

Dominique has been a practising futurist or foresight professional since mid 90s. Her futures work started as an in-house futurist at Nokia.

She has developed new approaches to help forward looking decision-making. Her particular passion is to understand people as they would be in the future.

With her in-depth experience across the high tech industries as well as her knowledge of various business models she combines business, technology and our humanness in her futures work.

She has expertise in facilitating futures implementation in large complex global organisations and also in expansion ready start-ups. She defines the programs with the client, clarifies the problem setting, engages the team of internal and external participants and facilitates toward meaningful insights for business benefits.

Dominique is an author and speaker on futures. She has done some of her futures work while in a business decision-making roles and has expertise in understanding the business contexts large or small.

Pragmatic futurist – speaker & facilitator

Humans operate with a world view. This world view is what tells us what is important but also tells us what is going on in the world. It is often piece meal. We are not conscious of this framework and it often does not correspond to how others see the world.

Apply this to the corporate environment. You run a business unit and you see the world as changing in one way and your colleague running another business unit sees it in another way. Or you team isn't aligned.

The trick is to seriously double check what in your current approach may not be relevant in the near (or long-term) future. And how you can shift to a flexible, shared and context aware framework and mind-map for faster decision-making in simple and complex organizations.

Critical questions to answer

If you do not know how to answer these questions confidently for the next five to even ten (in some industries more) years then you may be driving yourself to ground.

• What kinds of products should you have?
• What is the best strategy for growth?
• What is your view of the types of people needed to make things happen?
• What is the best organizational arrangement to go for the change?
• How is the competitive landscape changing? 
• How many products will you create, produce and support over time?
• What is the message your organization vouches for?
• How do you delight your customers – is your customer focus beyond what they could articulate?
• What is changing in the minds of your customers?
• How will your customers view your offering vs your clients' offerings?
• How should you differentiate in the market?
• Why should you do these things?
• What is the purpose and role of your organization in the larger narrative? Why?
• How could you leap beyond the industry 'conventional wisdom' to a well argued higher ground?

If these questions go unanswered or the answers are not externalized within an organization conflict ensues within decision-making. You may not know where this conflict comes from and this slows the organization down. 

Without up-to-date context awareness decisions miss the mark

The more and faster things change the more astute a mind-map you need to have for contextually aware strategies

• Do you know how the environment for your organization is changing?
• Are you able to communicate a narrative of the change for the organization?
• If one element changes within that narrative, are you able to quickly assess its impact on the rest of the narrative?
• Have you considered the various change aspects? Technology, societal/human, environmental, economic and (geo)political change? Have you brought those together into your narrative?
• Are people in your organization aware of this narrative? Can they repeat it? Are they able to apply it within their roles?
• Is your narrative exciting?
• Does your narrative engender action from the employees?
• When you recruit a new person how are they inducted to this narrative?
• Do the different functions in your organization know how this narrative applies to them?
• Does the organizational strategy reflect it?
• Does product and service creation apply the framework/narrative?
• Is marketing supporting the forward looking framework and taking your customers to the new space with you?
• Is the operational model relevant?
• Is the business model relevant?
• Is the ecosystem relevant?
• Are your people trained to update this framework, in their own minds and back into the organizational sub-frameworks and the overall narrative.
• Is your organization well oiled for change?

Ready to align, excite and speed up your organization and make change your ally?

For a quote and further discussion please use the site contact form.