Business Planning

FUTURISTS	An Internal Business Group	A Mainstream Consulting Group
Depth of vision	Immediate term	Respond to clients' time horizon
Pan-disciplinary	Knows its own business	Offers multiple skills
Breadth of vision	Conscious attention to detail	Varied expertise
Broad trend orientation	Techno-economic trends orientation	Industry trends orientation
A systems approach	Problem approach	Diagnostic and problem approach
Interaction of trends and factors; build up of cross relationships	Less emphasis on connections	Focus on selected relationships
Attention to wildcards and discontinuities	Continuity assumption dominates	Continuity assumption dominates
Full time exploration of the future	Attention episodic or part time	Attention episodic or part time/naive
Strategic focus	Bottom line focus	Client focus
Speak the unspeakable	Uncongenial thoughts/ ideas suppressed	Mayor may not explore the uncongenial
Long-term orientation	Short-term focus and reward structure	Solution focused
Futures exploration process yields fresh ideas	Builds on best current idea	Critiques idea
Emphasis on alternative futures, their implications for action	A single future often dominates	Weighted towards experts' most likely future
Mind changers	Mainstream thinking dominates	Often exploratory and persuasive
The future dominates recommended actions	Past experience, present concerns dominate	Historical industrial and case data support recommendations