One of the main challenges for businesses of all sizes is maintaining relevance – meeting the evolving needs of target audiences while outperforming the competition.
Maintaining status as a leader when technologies shift and the future is uncertain means navigating the journey ahead with confidence. Meanwhile, playing it safe and attempting to avoid risk can in fact be the biggest risk of all.
It’s here that the true value of future thinking is revealed, providing clarity and understanding when it comes to how businesses can evolve to meet changing requirements.
While some companies will embrace this ethos to pursue incremental innovation, allowing them to gradually adapt to developing trends, other businesses will opt for more disruptive innovation, taking bold risks to maximize potential returns.
With either approach, companies need to grasp everything from the immediate to long-term impact of pursuing new paths and develop a roadmap that enables their organization to pivot in response to a given outcome at each stage of their transformation journey.
There are different frameworks and methodologies that can be used to guide this process. Design thinking, for instance, while often applied to current stakeholders and user journeys, can equally be applied to the future. This process might also require collaboration with experts in other industries or from academia.
Entering the Future
It’s also collaboration that plays a key role in enabling businesses to proactively operate with the future in mind.
Through collaboration and co-creation, IT businesses can develop a symbiotic relationship with clients to create a process that moves embracing the future from a short-term transformation to a lasting commitment to remaining at the forefront of the industry.
At Stefanini, we collaborate with clients on a transformation process we call Embrace, which involves understanding the challenge our client faces, the forces in the market – globally and locally – that are affecting that challenge and the actionable changes to the business we could implement to respond to this challenge.
This lays the groundwork for creating a series of iterative prototypes to be tested with a projected future in mind.
This ensures we can create a minimum viable design of our proposal and test this to devise a strategy that will ensure clients remain relevant in the future.
From this point, we have a roadmap in place, which we can deliver against in an iterative process. That means we design, refine, assess risk and pivot if necessary to get to the point where a sustainable business change can be implemented.
Because internal acceptance is crucial, we also run awareness campaigns explaining and promoting new ways of working to our client’s employees, explaining how the new approach will equip the organization for developing challenges.
With this approach in place, the disrupted future isn’t something to be feared. Businesses that prepare effectively have the opportunity to turbocharge their relevance and reach new heights as they transform their organization.
