Transcript for:
Future Back Thinking Strategies for Business

good afternoon everybody and welcome to this interactive session on reimagining the future for better business outcomes with the help of some future back thinking i'm victor mills from the chamber it's great to have your company so what does future back thinking mean and how does it help us reimagine the future for the better business outcomes we all want to take us through this workshop i'm delighted to welcome three thinkers business leaders coachers and trainers um and they've come together as a collaboration eliza grant and gunner so i'd like to welcome each of you thank you very much for offering to do this for your your fellow members and without further ado i'm going to seed the floor to you and we look forward to a great session i'll be back at the end to um thank you and also talk about future chamber events but for now it's over to you eliza grant and gonna thank you so much thank you victor thank you victor so also in the name of eliza uh grant and myself gonna i would like to welcome you to this session today um my name is gonna yashik um yeah thanks for joining us uh it's great to see so many of you here today so it seems like the topic we are going to talk to uh to you about today uh somehow um is interesting for you in the current state when eliza grant and i sat down as a to prepare this session we thought okay how do we best start this and we thought it would be good maybe to start off with just a few sentences from each of us about what we think about future back thinking and the topic we're going to cover today and how we believe it's important in the current times that are challenging for all of us and i start off by just telling you when i first heard about future back thinking a couple of months ago i was just at the beginning of the whole corona crisis i thought to myself well this comes in quite handy at this stage because what we were seeing was that most organizations and companies out there and even individuals are so much focused on just getting through the current crisis and getting prepared for the immediate time after this crisis which is hopefully coming anytime soon that we thought oh that i thought to myself okay but what does that mean in the longer term so is it really enough to at the moment just focus on the immediate couple of months ahead or do we need to still reserve a certain amount of our energy and time to also think a little bit more further beyond being a little bit more innovative in the long term we see lots of innovation happening on a day-to-day basis by using systems like as we do right now with zoom and all that but what about all the real transformational innovation that is that customers want to see from us in the future so i thought maybe it's time to spend a little bit of our energy on the the future as well further beyond covet 19 and this is why we sat down created a concept on the framework which we would like to share in a very brief and quick workshop with you today grant what are your thoughts about uh the topic and what got you into it well thank you so much for that now to add to what gooner said as well too that future back thinking is one type of strategy so whereas uh present forward thinking asked the questions where we now where do we want to be how we're going to get there future back thinking by contrast as what does the future look like 10 years from now and what do we then need to do now to shape it to get better outcomes so both types of thinking are important for strategy one example johnson and johnson's 2030 vision they use future back thinking is to create a world without disease basing it around future trends like blockchain technology digitalization to create a digital twin of our dna and collaboration among private companies government education as well as the health care services and so the importance of future back thinking has helped us to be more pivotal more agile resilient help us to create blue ocean opportunities help us during mid crisis now to get out of the noise and chaos so we can think more clearly and help us to then be more proactive to change rather than reactive and so it opens up new possibilities better ways or better places that we want to be so we can create not only a new normal but create a better normal so eliza how about some thoughts from you too okay so uh in order to kind of reinforce the points made by guna and uh grant couple of things to look at in terms of leadership leaders and uh you know in organizations and societies are actually faced with the task and it will be a continuous challenge to balance the paradox between short and long long term objectives and if you think about it singapore actually practices in my view future back thinking how we already are looking at uh besides just getting through covet and the uh various budgets we are looking at sg 100 and therefore uh leading from the future says what is our vision of singapore 100 years and from now uh so what happens when we reach 100th birthday right what does that look like uh toby walsh in his book 2062 the world that i made uh talks about the decisions that we choose today impacting the future that we create and this is particularly in respect of technology ai robotics etc and if in a very much a.i uh dominated world uh what is it that we should be looking uh forward to but at the same time really trying to mitigate any of the unintended negative consequences thirdly thinking big and making things happen is basically how jack ma actually floated and i built his alibaba and it's all history now but i just wanted to also share with you the opening of a new industry and that is space logistics because elon musk actually has invested in 2008 in spacex nasa in partnership is now looking at commercial cargo to space stations this is what's happening and my husband who's actually here john biddleston always when i ask him where are you going he said i'm going to mars uh to to paris i've said to him no you're now going to say i'm going to europa because europa is a possibility it's talking about visiting a planet out of a jupiter's uh you know a kind of a circuit and the final point i want to make is this when you're looking at smes turning into unicorns all unicorns start from the future back because it is about the boldness and the coverage of your vision and working backwards in a very practical way so this is what we want to share with you and give you a taste of this afternoon i'm very confident you're going to have fun particularly in the exercises we come so over to you grant now all right great thank you so much eliza for that now this is a very interactive engaging workshop so we're going to use a lot of the different tools in zoom so let me introduce that for us first up front and one of the tools that we're going to use is the annotation text tool so right now everybody go to the top of your screen where it says view options click on view options then click on annotate you'll then see an annotation toolbar choose the one second from the left side it looks like a t it's a text tool and then type on the slide your industry within the quadrant based on your birthday so if your birthday's january to march top left april to june top right july to september bottom left october to december bottom right so again at the top of your screen click on view options then click annotate you'll see the annotation toolbar on the second from the left it's the text tool choose that one then type your industry name in the appropriate box now for us to see it after you finish typing it you have to click off of the word with your mouse so you need to click somewhere else on the slide if you don't click off the word only you can see it we cannot we obviously have a lot of january to march into the latest september birthdays nobody's nobody's born april to june or that was an arrow maybe pointing up somebody moved it up and for for now it's okay if you uh type the same place as somebody else uh we we do have an option for for us who are hosting it we can move things around just as i am now just to space them out a bit here all right so everybody seems to be able to get that tool that's one of the key tools we're going to be using in the session as well as other tools as well too so welcome everybody we can see we've got quite a range of different industries here education coming up a few times uh any other trans professional services i see a couple of times as well too so we do have quite a wide range of people from different industries as well in different functions and roles in those industries so welcome everybody to this session here so i'm gonna stop annotating the slide here for now i'm gonna then pass it back to eliza to lead us through the three-step playbook for future back thinking and through step one perfect so we'll go on to the next slide uh in a grant after this yes okay so these are the three step uh playbook uh that we're thinking about and this is how the afternoon is going to unfold we're going to go through uh the first step and uh it is a process that we want to share with you so the first step is to define the possible future states and that's what you know three of us will do with you in your breakout rooms and we will facilitate your thinking about uh the trends and issues in the next 10 years that you're actually expecting to look at how these impacts in terms of future states and then to choose two of the future states that we can think about before we move on to the next two steps so in this particular first step uh you will be broken up into breakout rooms on the random basis i want to say thank you for those of you who actually submitted some of the pre-work which is thinking about the trends and the issues that your industry may be facing and we will share that with you when you get into your rooms step two will be where guna will take you and it would be looking at the two future states that you have chosen in this in the first exercise and looking for the synergies between them so that you can at least identify as a group one soa or strategic opportunity area so the process here is that as a result of thinking about it you might be able to find an avenue for entrepreneurship think about uh you know where it is you could be actually having a different business innovation model that is going to pay off and the soa is really something that is concrete that you guys can work on which brings us sorry grant is going to do step two to do that and he will explain the neurosciences and how that gets done step three will be what guna will end up with today which is that how do we take this soa and make it come to life so it becomes a very practical planning and this is where the future back uh plan uh it really pays off it is uh to look at 10 years from now if you have this soa let's work backwards from there uh in terms of where we are today and every uh two years in terms of milestone these would be the ways we are measuring our progress towards the soa and obviously you can tweak the soa when uh you know circumstances changes but what we really want to do is to share with you the methodology and that's your key takeaway so it's really about the playbook so at this stage uh you know having known what the annotation is etc we are ready now for sicc to put us into our three play rooms so uh you guys will be just joining us in the play rooms to play with the notion of analyzing the trends forces and issues defining the possible future states and then choosing the two future states and there are four questions that we will ask you to address in our breakout so ready to go on the breakout guys whenever sicc is ready we'll just join them perfect so let me just ask you very quickly in a couple of minutes to just come in and share what do you think is the value that you're getting from this exercise guys uh the value of for thinking about future states seeing other people's points of view all right i've seen other people's point of view and those of you who'd like to also uh come off you please do so and the others you can please put in the chat window what is the value of just going through the exercise we are not looking for the outcomes at the stage i think eliza it's um not not not just focusing on the here and now but looking at what might what might eventuate right okay so what might be therefore what we might or what we should be thinking about and planning for yes okay so it's about the possibilities right it's about creativity to look at that and it's also about visioning and this is how when you're talking about leaders and being inspirational it is all about uh you know the idea of of envisioning future states perfect thank you who else and if you want to put in the chat i'll do so what else are you getting out of the exercise connecting the dots somebody says right good anything else feel free to just add in and come off mute if you'd like to do so because 27 people here so from alpha expand the possibilities great and exchange of ideas and building on them perfect we only had 20 minutes to do this right align the resources i agree because once you know what your future state is you are able to kind of work backwards and that's the purpose of this okay so that gives us a feel of the first part of the methodology uh not constrained by the present absolutely so it frees your mind to do that perfect so with that i'm going to now pass you over to grant uh to get you ready for the second exercise and send some interconnectivity thank you very much liz all right perfect grant over to you great thank you so much elijah for that so we're gonna then move on to the second step in this three-step playbook and this is about finding insights and synergies now first of all let's look at some of the neuroscience and how our brains actually function so when we are small children we get an idea in our brain it's like a drop of water they're individual drops in our tiny little brain then when we grow up a little bit then those drops start to form these small streams and then when we become adults they form these very deep rivers and this is our frame of reference this is the box that we see the world in so to help us to reimagine the future we want to get out of those frames of references so that we can see a much bigger possibility get beyond that zoom angle outside of that frame so we can see much bigger here secondly in neuroscience an insight is when two signals or ideas in our brain come together to create a new signal or idea and so we're going to introduce a concept of future storming which is brainstorming about the future but specifically when we look at having two future states how can we then combine that together to create new insights and synergies and so in this next step step two finding insights and synergy step out of your own frame of reference so you can reimagine the future outside of that zoom frame that we're all in right now combine future states together to uncover the insights and synergies what we call future storming or brainstorming about the future and then we're going to then determine one strategic opportunity area that we'll then focus on so again we're going to go back into our same breakout groups and then we're going to then move on to step two all right welcome back everybody we're all now back in the main room here we want to then debrief here first of all to uh what is your strategic opportunity area so if we could have one volunteer then from each group to then present that back verbally for us that would be great so if we can then first of all maybe start off with uh eliza's group with group one if somebody if you already chose somebody from your group great if we haven't could somebody then come off mute and let us know what is the strategic opportunity area that you chose well we chose affordable customized medicine affordable customized medicine interesting in other words you know customized medicine that's not for the rich but is for for everybody and um then john suggested that that needed to be we needed to qualify both the potential customers as well as the potential providers yeah so that's what that's what the first room came up with great well thank you so much for that here uh group two which was my group here can somebody come off mute in our group to introduce what it was is going to be our strategic opportunity area a volunteer we didn't choose one in our group beforehand there oh who's where we're gonna go chen ken can you do that for us didn't you mind i'd love to but i uh i don't i forgot the notes right let me uh just go back here and i'll uh show you yeah we did it yeah we we put quite a lot of comments out there so yeah but what i'll do is i'll i'll give you i'll help you out i'll i'll share it i'll share it there for you on the screen you can present that back with what you see up on the screen there for us yes yes okay our team our theme looking at the future state of basically making the workplace is also uh you know a learning place all right for continuous uh learning as well as embedding with a lot of innovative solutions for the future so our soa is talking about having a workplace as being fun and opportunity to develop individuals at the same time you you get to you care to translate ideas into real-world applications you have a lot of opportunity to experiment make mistakes and at the same time there is a lot of cross-learning and support from the fellow peers who are working in the same environment all right so this is the so our team was talking about great thank you so much for that here and we'll go on to group three gunar's group somebody from guru nanak's group go ahead and present back for us what was your soap did we already select somebody gunar or if not pick somebody i didn't pick it either but they could maybe pick somebody for us then so i think uh the one the one we ultimately picked as an soa was very well presented by leon if i'm not wrong so maybe you can just briefly let the rest of the group know what we came up with okay thanks we actually picked uh building a more robust uh circular economy going forward uh why we actually do i mean uh consider that is because we're looking at a delivering benefits uh that will reduce the pressure on the environment improve you know supply chain increase competitiveness in a way it also stimulate innovation and and and help get us to rethink about the business model and create more jobs working towards uh reducing waste and building a sustainable society all right great well thank you so much for sharing that all great ideas that we're all going to be working on into stage three in just a moment here right now let's take 30 seconds oh everybody open up the chat panel and then share some of your thoughts down and chat to that question up on the slide there as well too so what did you learn about deriving insights and synergies from future states so take 30 seconds everybody parallel process type in chat at the same time we've got what do you say 25 people in the session here about at least with maybe 18 participants here everybody type down in chat 30 seconds to try to get as many ideas as you can down there what did you learn about deriving insights and synergies from future states and we're going for quantity and diversity of ideas any idea you think of type it down in chat there's no wrong answers you need to think talk debate think some more opportunities are plentiful open listening is key let's get a few more ideas up in there there's 20 18 of you maybe here again it's not a test it's a it's about helping us all learn helping us all learn and transfer tips and best practices for all of us thanks for that victor thinking big open to opportunities cross-fertilization i love that word hold your judgment it is possible all right great a few others they're coming up building on light bulbs great imagination imagining the possibilities drawing strengths from different ideas right yeah so we've got to step out of those current frameworks that we're in and expand those possibilities here so we're going to then now move on i'm going to pass it over to gunar then to take us through step three of this playbook well thank you uh thank you grant so now it's really time for us to [Music] put everything we've just come up with all the visioning and all the ideas we have created about a potential future and what potential customers in the future might want to see from us now it's time for us to take a step back and really make it happen right so now it's all about converting these visions into very tangible plans so we want to look into our strategic opportunity area and we'll now do what we all came here for we will do finally the step with the future back planning right um so far we only looked into the future now we plan from that back so what we're gonna do is we will look into the future look into the strategic opportunity area we have identified for 10 years from now and then planned back with milestones two year milestones all the way to the present and this will hopefully then give us the chance to also inform some of our very next steps our the steps that we want to take um in the next couple of years in order to give us direction towards the strategic opportunity area we have identified um so i think on the next slide if i'm not wrong grant we have uh yeah we have the template so we all gonna go back into our breakout rooms very soon and do this last step so we're gonna look at the timeline here from 2030 all the way back to today and we'll create those milestones and even if we got time sometimes it takes a little bit longer and the time we have and the breakout is very short we might even go one step further and look into the concrete actions that we might have to take in order to get to our uh or yeah well really make our strategic opportunity area a reality so without further ado i think we can directly go back into our breakouts and have fun with the last step all right welcome back everybody [Music] just a quick debrief of this last step that we've just taken the future back planning um really we'd really be interested to to learn from all the different groups about what was easy or difficult about working back from the future since we're all more inclined and used to working present forward and thinking about what are the next steps what are the next steps we could take this time we try to do it the other way around so we really yeah and somebody is already starting the discussion in chat so i would encourage you to just write down in chat very briefly very quickly what was easy or difficult about this last exercise we've just done and if you got something to verbally verbally share with us please by always feel free to come off mute and let us know as well finding the right partner was the most difficult thing of all finding the right partner yeah in terms of new business all right finding the new partner partner was the most difficult in the in the process of future back yes because i didn't know most of the others i only i only knew one okay understand well that's not true i knew too so what do we have here easy to think about the end state hard to decide on the milestones yes obviously i mean it takes a little bit of practice it is a it is a different and we had it in our group as well you you suddenly switch back and think okay oh is it maybe something the milestone yet is a milestone but maybe it comes at the beginning and we're skipping a little bit the the linear way of moving from the future back but this is this is okay and i think you know i just want to come back on this one right about uh the methodology it is exactly what happens if you are thinking about it when richard branson first thought of virgin galactica it was a dream and in 2004 uh you know uh if he was looking back 10 years before that the technology may not happen there he actually took a big risk in and all these guys when they are looking at unicorns they're really thinking big because they have a passion they have to believe that that is the end state that they were looking for and they had to work backwards somehow to get the financing uh the right people working on the technologies to make it happen and uh the future of space today in terms of planet earth is not going to be available if you don't have that kind of vision and one other thing to add to that in our group as well too we had eight people in our group discussing this six of them were working from the future back two of them started from 2020 working and we met in the middle as well too so it's not necessarily a linear process we can start with that future back i'm setting those 20 30 milestones 2028 milestones then come back to the present okay what do we need to do moving forward here and we can then reach in the middle it's also not a linear process it's a iterative process so we go back and forth we'll revise this as we go along as well too yeah and we had that as well so we had exactly the same situation where we also ended up with a number of uh of milestones being in parallel right so we had for 2024 there were multiple milestones where we thought okay that they really have to be in place so i have to be achieved by that time um i and laguna i get from kg thank you kg understanding the interdependencies can be a challenge uh and also from timothy uh most important thing is to never give up despite the challenges that i've faced absolutely uh he wouldn't have uh you know um spacex if you had given up difficult to sustain the effort need to adapt and change during the journey absolutely and with the disruption that's even uh you know more right i love this never surrender uh okay yeah all right i mean this brings us really to the wrapper um just what you see on on screen right now is just one more time the three steps that we've gone through today the first one where we really try to define the possible future states uh partly based on the input we already received from you before the session and thanks again for that so we really looked at what are the trends and forces influencing our industries or the world at the moment and what are some potential future states and then we pick two of them and try to create something from them right so we find the insights and synergies by just looking at the two main future states we had identified and what what would they mean together if we brought them together what other synergies and insights we could create and finally then really bringing it back into uh from from all the the high level thinking and and the imaginary back into hands-on creating a plan so if we want to be at a certain state in or if we expect to be at a certain state in 2030 what would that mean for us on a two-year step-by-step plan really planning from the future back what would we need to achieve in my group we didn't manage to really go down into the actions uh as deeply uh we stuck with the milestones for now but i think you all get the concept uh once we have the milestones we would then certainly look at what are some of the individual tasks and if we did it all the way back to 2020 then it's all about now rolling up the sleeves and get to work towards what we want to see in 2030 really and yeah i don't know uh eliza grant anything to add at this stage before we wrap up nope i think we're fine and no no nothing to add i'll just move on to the to the the last two slides then to uh wrap up the session for us as well too then so uh uh thank you guys for that as well and um for everybody thank you all for for taking this session here think for yourself afterwards how will you apply this for yourself and your organization so that you can have more clarity of the future and a better understanding of what we need to do now to shape better outcomes now we also have a custom designed tailored solution for organizations so we take everything and we expand on it more thoroughly over a four week program each week taking one of the topics and then right week four wrap it up in a final plan and follow up for this uh future back strategy each week as you see in the bottom starting from the bottom left it's a one hour ideal virtual experience and this means intense dynamic engaging accountable learning which is our approach to virtual experiences there's a lot of neuroscience backing up why this is the ideal way to learn which we can share with you afterwards as well each week has assignments peer coaching and then we use a mural collaboration board so we can have more effective collaborations to help you and your organizations to create better outcomes and a better normal in the future so um if you want to find out more about this you can email us we'll happy happy to talk to you about this and your organization as well too so on behalf of uh eliza gunner and myself we want to thank all of you for taking your time to come here and share your thoughts and ideas and experiences and examples with us let's take what we've learned from this apply to ourselves and our organizations so we can create a better future more clarity around the future and know what we need to do right now to start shaping that for ourselves and for our organization so if you have any questions or would like to find out more about the tailored solution the email address is on the slide there info at egg solutions.com egg is our partnership the three of us it's also the initials of our names eliza grant and gunnar so thank you all very much again stay safe and let me turn it back over to victor to uh close up for us thank you very much grant um i i just want to thank um eliza grant and gunner for taking the time to share this methodology with us and i'd also like to thank the audience members who contributed um that was that was very interesting i thoroughly enjoyed it and i can see how we might be able to use some of this in our own strategizing which which is a chamber where we're just coming to the end of a three month virtual board off site how about that so thank you very much if there's anything the chamber can do for you please don't hesitate to reach out to me or my team at here to help at sicc.com.sg and until the next time take care and goodbye thank you so much thank you victor thank you thanks everybody thank you thank you so much take care bye thank you