New Section! Futurists and Business Planning: A Comparative View
Find out how working with a futurist may be your most valuable option in planning for the future of your business. Find out more!

American business, whether profit or non-profit, as well as governmental and other organizations, are caught up in planning for the future. They need and often seek a range of assistance which Joe Coates, as a consulting futurist, can provide.

Lectures and Briefings

Topics defining the future, whether about some product, service, or interest, and whether about the whole organization and its external environment or about some component of a business such as research, marketing, or human resources-these are all fair subjects for a presentation of from forty-five minutes to several hours. Briefings may fruitfully be directed to: an organization's CEO or Executive Suite, the Board of Directors, external advisory groups, non-executive senior managers, trainees, task forces, or the staff in a particular area.

Seminars

Often missing from the workplace is the opportunity for managers to sit down with a specialist and discuss matters of organizational concern in an open-ended, free form way. The seminar is excellent way to do this. It is often started by a brief introductory set of comments on how to think about the future, followed by an hour or more of free form discussion.

Critiquing Your Own Futures Work

Since most organizations do not have a full-time futurist, much less a complement of them, a valuable service is to review and critique a futures report produced internally. Coates has had substantial success in doing that, as shown by the appreciation of clients for the changes and improvements he recommended.

Preparation of a Video or Audio Cassette

The concept of the visiting futurist can be broadened. Rather than, or in addition to, having Coates appear in the flesh, a video on a particular topic for circulation within the organization can be a low cost, high content, high value investment. Coates can prepare either videos or audio CDs or tapes in the form of the visiting futurist. A group of people listening or viewing can then use that material as a launching pad for their own internal discussion of factors shaping the organization's future. Alternatively, some clients record a formal, in-person briefing for later internal circulation.

Projects

Sometimes an organization needs more than a single dose of the future, or a larger dose than can be delivered in a day or two. To meet that need, a brief project may be an order-something that can be done in one to three months, producing a document heavy with charts, tables, and illustrations to provide a more comprehensive durable view of the future. The reporting style of such small projects is important because they should lend themselves to easy conversion into a briefing by the staff or for placing on the organization's Intranet. They should be written in a style that is easy to grasp, easy to scan, and easy to identify points important to particular staff members.

Futures Day

Several clients have had great success with a Futures Day, in which they have a variety of activities that expose large number of staff to formal material on the future and also demonstrate to each what they have been doing in regard to the future. A variation on this, which is popular and effective, is to bring in key customers and expose them to the future, as a supplier-to-customer freebie. One advantage to introducing customers to the future is that it puts them in a better position to think about new concepts, new products, and new services.