PPB August 2018

with operational excellence. This balance ensures you are at least able to keep up in your own market. There’s always the possibility that your team or organization can be put in a tight spot as it attempts to grow and innovate. Resources can be stretched thin, productivity can decline, and unforeseen events can influence your success. You may have a great plan, but without the right resources, leadership and ability to execute, your great plan won’t matter. So, which comes first? Operational excellencemust be assured before strategic foresight can take priority. If operational excellence stumbles, take time to reestablish your footing before you look ahead. Innovation Is Necessary But wait a minute. What’s wrong with maintaining your current situation? Why can’t an organization coast at its current level of success? Or just continue to grow by repeating what’s worked in the past to expand its customer base or member count? What kind of necessity is innovation? The answer might surprise you. Innovation is truly a matter of survival. The nature of market growth implies that businesses will become obsolete if they don’t actively change along with their customers and industries. This kind of change can be reactive or proactive: • Reactive: You observe your competitors innovating by creating new products, services, branding or business practices that cater to a new and unprecedented demand in the market. Your response is to jump on the bandwagon and pray you aren’t too far behind the crowd. • Proactive: You analyze the market and pinpoint trends. As markets grow, you’re the first to know and the first to grow with them. You even anticipate market trends before they happen, innovating just in time for demand to reach critical mass. You position yourself as a pioneer of your industry. Being reactive means you’re late to the game, scrambling to respond to shifts in the market that your competitors have already recognized and prepared for. There’s no innovation, only emulation. Now you’re racing against time and your competitors. Suddenly your organization is under threat. Being proactive allows room for preparation. Your organization has the opportunity to gather the right resources and be the first in its field to address a new need. This is innovation. And it is critical to minimizing risk. Of course, innovation requires that you do your homework. Identifying and analyzing market trends is a discipline in itself. Innovations of any kind can flop, as we often see in the real world. You’ll need to be able to gauge where the market is today and where it’s heading, with great accuracy and accountability. But that’s why you are interested in strategic foresight. Strategic Foresight | FEATURE What Is This Playbook? The Strategic Foresight Playbook introduces the concept of strategic foresight and its application. It has been carefully designed to explain strategic foresight and provide plays, or activities, you can carry out to get the benefits of strategic foresight for yourself. Within the 70-plus pages are a collection of plays, activities for use in varying situations to help your company get ahead. When we say strategic foresight, we mean the capacity to look at the future and spot emerging trends so you can proactively address them, either by preparing for the disruptions they will bring or by orienting yourself to be in the best possible position to take advantage of these trends. Either way, it’s guaranteed that the clearer you are about what’s coming, the more prepared you are to succeed in the days ahead. How Does This Playbook Work? In the first few chapters, we lay out some basic explanations so you get an idea of the territory of strategic foresight. Then comes the section marked Plays. Flip through them to find the strategies you believe are best suited to your organization—those most likely to catalyze, accelerate, or increase your likelihood of success. Then read the overviews. They are purposefully kept brief so you can quickly scan and choose plays that seem best for you. At this stage, your goal is to follow the recipe. Just adhere to the instructions and experience the benefits they’ll bring to you and your organization. The plays vary in application for different kinds of organizations. Sprinkled throughout are examples for three types of organizations. These examples are just a handful of ways to apply the plays. They are provided to make it easier to see how application might happen, not to limit your imagination. How To Obtain A Copy Download a free digital copy or purchase hard copies ($18 for PPAI members/$25 for PPAI associates) at www. ppai.org/strategic-foresight- playbook. To order 10 or more hard copies or to request a speaker on this topic, email playbook@ppai.org. | AUGUST 2018 | 29