NAVIGATING UNCERTAINTY WITH FUTURECASTING

If Covid-19 taught us anything, it’s that organizations need to be better prepared for future uncertainty. While the last few months witnessed an extraordinary surge in innovation and agility, many companies were caught by surprise and had to act fast in order to survive. Disruptions like these are only going to increase in frequency and intensity – so what can we do to prepare ourselves?
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Published 2021

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PREPARING FOR THE ECONOMIC BOOM

A boom is upon us. The economic indicators are loudly positive. Consumers are awash with funds from pandemic-induced savings and government stimulus checks. Many businesses are cash-rich and hungering for growth. Everyone is euphoric with post-Covid freedoms. It’s a perfect storm of positivity. We can’t know how long it will last, but we can be certain it will transform the fortunes of companies ready for this moment. How can you prepare?

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Published April, 2021

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AFTER COVID-19, HOW DOES INNOVATION CHANGE?

For many organizations, the challenges faced in 2020 were unprecedented. To survive the pandemic and prepare for an uncertain future, businesses had to innovate in ways they never had before. In this paper, we lay out the five innovation practices that found widespread adoption over the last year, and that we recommend companies continue embracing well after COVID-19.

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​Published January, 2021

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three steps to re-designing your b2b sales strategy post-pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has foisted lightning-fast change on B2B sales organizations already seeking to transform their cost-effectiveness. The dislocations occurring now create opportunity to reshape sales organizations and strategies for the future, including after the pandemic ends. This paper shows how sales leaders can undertake a three-step innovation process to create both incremental and radical change.

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Published August 26, 2020

​A TIME FOR REINVENTION: HOW ARTS AND CULTURE ORGANIZATIONS CAN ELEVATE THEIR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DURING THE PANDEMIC

​The coronavirus has transformed the way communities interact with nearly every sector, and no more so than in the arts and culture field. While the pandemic has accelerated pre-existing trends, such as the hunger for online experiences, it has also introduced totally new forms of behavior. In this paper, we explain how arts and culture organizations can assess their audience’s reshuffled priorities and design a winning customer experience to weather the COVID-19 crisis.

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Published May 15, 2020

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put your people first: building organizational safety and resiliency

We are bombarded by opinions on when it will be safe and wise to bring societies back to more normal operations after the outbreak of COVID-19. For your business, however, you need to make firm decisions governed by clear principles. Your employees and your customers are likely looking for certainty, not conjecture. This paper provides a framework for arriving at those decisions, along with inspiration about what tangible steps you might take.

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Watch a recording of the webinar here >>> 
Published May 5, 2020

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What behavior changes will last after the coronavirus?

The coronavirus has forced us to live and work differently. Some of these new approaches are cumbersome, but others are surprisingly better. What new behaviors will stick once this crisis passes? In this paper, we explain six factors that lead to lasting behavior change, and describe how to use market research to assess whether and how your customers will revert to old patterns or be permanently altered.

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Published April 1, 2020

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Using journey maps to understand how the coronavirus has changed customer behavior

In this paper, we delve into four elements that drive customer behavior now in this time of the coronavirus: improving my quality of life, providing for my family, alleviating stress, and ensuring a secure future. We then show the ways that journey mapping can help organizations rethink customer experiences in light of the potentially lasting effects of this crisis.

We also shine a spotlight on the restaurant industry and highlight seven examples that show how these establishments are re-imagining their customers’ experiences.

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Published April 1, 2020

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Managing Through the Coronavirus, Phase by Phase

While the coming months of the coronavirus crisis will be difficult for any manager, the issues businesses will face fall into clear categories and phases. This paper explores four phases the coronavirus crisis will pass through as well as four types of uncertainties to address during each phase to enable both immediate and sustained success.

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Published March 23, 2020

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Strategic PLanning in a time of coronavirus

Coronavirus is creating highly uncertain times, and managers have their hands full navigating the crisis today. But they also need to plan for what their decisions now will mean for the future. This paper shares our learnings for strategic planning during highly uncertain times like these, including traps to watch out for, guidance for scenario planning, and advice for leading strategy conversations virtually. 

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Published March 16, 2020

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Quantifying Feelings: Using Surveys to Measure Emotional Jobs to Be Done

There is no doubt that emotions are notoriously tricky to pin down. Unlike variables such as cost, size, or ease of purchase, emotions neither discrete nor concrete, making them difficult to compare. What “delights” one consumer may “thrill” another. The question is, what’s the difference? Even more pertinent, does the difference matter? Parsing out specific emotions is useful only if doing so leads to a clear course of action. Measuring emotions with a survey is difficult, but there is a way to do it. Our research into emotional jobs is guided by 3 key principles, which we lay out in this working paper.

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Published ​Winter 2019

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Understanding the "Why" in customer experience: Journey Mapping Meets Jobs to be done

Every journey map comes with a promise: visualizing customers' experience helps companies design powerful solutions.  Yet, journey maps often fail to reach this goal, falling into the common traps of neglecting to explain the journey's larger context, assuming that customers are hyper-rational, and becoming too complex to be useful.  This working paper shows how to leverage Jobs to be Done in journey mapping to uncover unmet needs and pave the way to successful innovation.

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Published Summer 2019

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Speeding growth: 8 Drivers of Fast Product Adoption

Some new products become popular seemingly overnight; others languish for years despite being great ideas.  In our Winter 2017 working paper, we ask: why?  What accounts for the varying adoption speeds of different innovations?  Is there anything to do to move things along more rapidly?  Eight factors stood out as major influencers in the adoption speed of an innovation. 

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Published Winter 2017

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Getting to know tomorrow's customers: Using 'Jobs to be done' to become a customer-centered Organization

'Jobs to be Done' is a theory about how customers make decisions.  It helps us understand why customers buy what they buy, allowing us to proactively design solutions that are more likely to succeed in the market. This working paper explains our step-by-step framework for using Jobs to be Done, and illustrates our process with a case study in the food & beverage industry.

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Published Spring 2017

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Innovating From The Inside Out: 8 Steps To Becoming An Innovation Powerhouse

Through our history of helping organizations large and small tackle their innovation needs, we have identified eight critical steps to bolster a company's innovativeness.  This free working paper outlines both organizational-level and on-the-ground steps that you can take to be more innovative tomorrow.​​

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Published Summer 2016

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Combatting Institutional Blindness: How Companies Can Illuminate The Future

Many companies suffer from what we call institutional blindness: an ignorance about context that leads to taking inappropriate risks, missing key trends, and developing competitive vulnerabilities. In this working paper, we outline the Innovation Knowledge Matrix--the results from a five-year process of cataloging what companies think they know and what leads them to become disconnected from emerging realities. It shows how companies can combat tunnel vision, unchecked assumptions, and other forms of institutional ignorance. 

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Published Winter 2015

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Strategic Planning In Times Of Uncertainty

Traditional approaches to strategic planning are unsuited to increasingly volatile business environments.  They ignore uncertainty about future conditions, gloss over the diverging views of stakeholders, and frequently avoid the need to make hard choices.  This working paper discusses a range of tools to help companies consider a variety of scenarios, account for opposing viewpoints, force difficult decisions, and look dispassionately at both new types of threats and emerging opportunities. It also provides guidance on organizing more effective strategy retreats. 

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Published Winter 2014

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Capability Case Study

This case study discusses how Cognizant, a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing systems, deployed a new innovation methodology--Jobs to be Done--throughout its vast and decentralized workforce without causing disruption to the organization.

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Published Summer 2014  

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Beacons for Business Model Innovation

Business model innovation is a hot topic in management thinking, even though there seems to be little agreement about what it looks like and even less about how to discover it. But there is no reason for business model innovation to feel mysterious or hard to achieve. This working paper presents two pattern recognition tools to empower companies to pick and develop breakthrough winners in their business model innovation portfolio. 

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Published by Deloitte Doblin, Spring 2014

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