Based on the Business Futures Network – a spinoff from Stanford Research Institute’s groundbreaking horizon-scanning operation – Futurealities was formed in 2003.
Who We are
What we do
How we can help
Our purpose (collectively as a flexible team, as well as on an individual partner level) is to assist public and private organizations to:
• Develop a sensitivity to possible futures in many dimensions.
• Create an internal discipline to evaluate and mitigate
corporate/organizational risk.
• Generate new insights into the future as a catalyst for
successful innovation and growth.
Working as partners in foresight, our work can range from broad futures scanning assignments, helping clients to anticipate both future risks and areas of potential opportunity, through to hands-on assistance in helping translate those opportunities into new product/service concepts and business initiatives. Our “horizon scanning” provides a continuing source of new ideas, from which we distill the weak signals of change and all that they may imply.
The format of our work can vary according to client needs, but often we run hands-on, lively workshops, in which we “stress-test” assumptions about the future. In this way we can:
• Make explicit what may be only vaguely articulated implicit
assumptions about future environments.
• Vigorously challenge these internal assumptions about the future.
• Help clients recognize the risks of blindly adhering to prevailing
world views.
• Create an opportunity to view futures from different perspectives
and analyze the consequences of unsuspected change.
• Stimulate new insights that can reveal possibilities for innovation.
• Improve resilience to systemic risk.
We want to assist clients in understanding how their own assumptions about the future – on which any organization’s continuity depends – need to be validated or modified. Our goal is to enable futures thinking to inform, and thus improve, strategic planning and business development.