Innovation Archives

‘Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been,’ this Wayne Gretzky quote was one of Steve Jobs’ favourites. It underlined his focus on ‘the next big thing’ as a window of opportunity to pounce on, think the iPod or music streaming.

The future can’t be predicted, but foresight work helps you make sense of change, reduce shocks and shorten your odds on big bets

While I like its future orientation and focus on identifying the next consequential shift, the puck metaphor never worked that well for me. Pucks travel in straight lines, but the future happens in fits, starts, and handbrake turns. ‘There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen’, as Lenin is reported to have noted. A historical insight that feels particularly prescient for anyone planning major initiatives in today’s environment. How will the rise of economic nationalism impact our supply chain? How will AI shape our future products and services – and talent profile? How will tech-savvy and proactive Boomers shake up longstanding assumptions about ageing?

The future can’t be predicted, but foresight work helps you make sense of change, reduce shocks and shorten your odds on big bets.

Innovators prefer to use foresight to anticipate to initiate. We don’t analyse trends as passive observers, but as active agents with designs on making a dent in the future. The bigger the bet, the bigger the need. The longer the time horizon. The bigger the investment. The higher the potential for market disruption. The more reckless it is to wing it.. For example, automotive or train hardware initiatives can have time horizons of over a decade, and in aviation, multiple decades. The investments involved are huge, as are the levels of uncertainty.

A client recently asked me to summarise my approach to foresight work, which tends to focus on consumer tech, healthcare and mobility initiatives. I boiled it down to these 10 tenets.

Set strategy in a future context

‘Strategy must be created from the future backwards,’ as Gary Hamel, the management guru, pithily put it. Building an informed set of assumptions about the future enables executives to envision and plan for a landscape that does not yet exist. Once you’ve outlined a future state, you have something to plan against. This approach counters a natural continuity bias, assuming it will be an incremental improvement on today, which is akin to driving into the future by looking in the rear-view mirror.

Curate viewpoint diversity

Too much foresight work suffers from wishful thinking. To help avoid projecting our hopes (and fears) onto the future, it’s best to find ways to distance ourselves from our unconscious biases. A good way to do this is to ensure your team holds differing viewpoints so that assumptions can be better explored and interrogated. A useful complement to this approach is to add some external domain experts to the mix, boosting thought-leading viewpoint diversity and credibility.

Start with critical decisions

The future is a big place, and there are hundreds of shifts to choose from. To avoid foresight theatre amid a mix of generic trends and hot topics, it’s wise to ground futures work in the strategic choices the business is pretty sure it’ll have to make. These decisions form trend-selection criteria to ensure you focus on the pertinent rather than the flavour-of-the-month buzz topics. You should still be open to uncovering some wildcard trends, but being decision-focused ensures your efforts will be actionable.

Anchor in reality

Foresight work inevitably leans into what is changing and can quickly untether itself from reality. To prevent ‘futures intoxication’, ground the work in recent economic, technological and cultural facts to ground it on baseline truths. Reflecting on the tricky job of predicting the rate of change, the futurist Roy Amara cautioned that ‘We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.’

Back in 2016, like many others, I was initially swept up in the Autonomous Vehicle hype. This was the year when the CEO of Lyft, an Uber competitor, claimed that most Lyft rides would be in driverless taxis by 2022. That didn’t happen, but 10 years on, in 2026, robocabs are a daily reality in some Chinese and US cities, with US-based Waymo recently announcing it’s now operating 0.5m rides a week across 10 cities.

Take the long view

An overemphasis on shiny new bandwagons blights futures work. How much time and resources were burned on the patently woolly notion of the Metaverse? Key decisions are just as likely to be influenced by the evolution of long-established trends as the latest fad setting the podcasts alight. It can often be more insightful and actionable to really understand the recent developments of a long-established trend that is pertinent to your strategic choices, rather than get distracted by the mania of the moment.

In the depths of Covid lockdowns and after a few years of Flygskam (flight shame) appearing in trend decks, I pointed out in a talk that air travel continued to rise after 9/11 and the financial crisis, and would likely do the same post-pandemic. Global passenger traffic surpassed pre-pandemic volumes in 2024 – and is set to double by 2045. It pays to pull up to gain the wider 35,000-ft perspective. To paraphrase Hans Rosling, bad news comes quickly, good news happens slowly.

Dig under the surface

Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a trend is a well-worn business proverb. Foresight demands more than pattern recognition and description. To understand what’s really driving change, you have to examine how trends develop — their interactions with drivers and inhibitors. Narrowing down to a manageable number of pertinent trends gives you more time to analyse the underlying forces beneath them – both their drivers and their counter-drivers. Digging beneath surface appearances to identify and assess the balance of forces helps you reach firmer judgments on likely trajectories and impacts.

It was only when I dug deeper into the CASE (Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric) vision of the future of mobility across numerous projects that so many economic, infrastructural, technological, social, environmental and ergonomic speed bumps surfaced.

Challenge tech inevitability

One of the most common errors—especially in tech companies—is viewing the future through the lens of the tech hype, assuming (often implicitly) that tech is the primary driver of change. This blinkered view had us living through the Atomic Age, Space Age, Supersonic Age, Information Age, and now the Age of AI. It’s an easy trap: the belief is widely held and loudly trumpeted, plus technology is simpler and more tangible than the messier and more abstract social, cultural, economic, and legislative forces at play.

Technology is not destiny. Many hyped trends never materialise—remember 3D TV or the Hydrogen cars? And, even when they do, they are shaped by other forces. Social, cultural and political shifts often prove more decisive. Few futurists in the 1970s and 1980s anticipated the sweeping rise of women in the workplace and wider society in the decades that followed. Also, consumers are not passive recipients of innovation; they shape it to their own ends. Consider today’s pushback against EVs and heat pumps.

Construct alternative futures

The future cannot be predicted; so don’t sweat crafting perfect predictions. Instead, generate a range of potential futures plotted along dimensions of the main uncertainties you have identified. Building, discussing, and assessing these alternative future worlds challenge assumptions, expand options, and improve judgment. You are not aiming for any one scenario to be a prescient prediction. The future usually includes elements from multiple scenarios, and different customer segments can end up in separate ones. Then assess your hypotheses, decisions or concepts against each scenario to check their robustness across alternative futures.

You’ll overlook some developments, but the very act of working through different scenarios will raise your game. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, WWII general and U.S. president, reflected ‘In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.’

Build a point of view

Foresight is not a science; it’s a convincing perspective on future opportunities and risks. To make it strategic, you need to combine far-sightedness with shrewd thinking about the implications and opportunities for your organisation. The same future can affect different companies in very different ways, so your plan should be tailored to your context.

Ultimately, your foresight assumptions will be educated guesses and judgment calls. There’s no data on the future, so it’s down to you to build a credible, coherent, compelling and commercial case for your planning decisions. Credibility comes from facts and expert opinion — the ammunition behind your bold claims. Your story needs to cohere; if the pieces don’t reinforce each other, sceptical executives will find the gaps. Being compelling means reaching beyond logic to your audience’s instincts and ambitions. And being commercial? That’s the part most foresight work skips: articulating how your view of the future translates into competitive advantage and growth.

Since your point of view will be based on facts, if those facts change, your opinions might need to be updated. As the futurist, Paul Saffo sagely put it: ‘hold strong opinions weakly…If you must forecast, then forecast often and be the first to prove yourself wrong.’

Weave into a strategic narative

Bullet points rarely build buy-in. To convince, tell an engaging story that pulls together all the pertinent threads from disparate sources into a singular thread. This narrative will require more than the core strategy; it will also need some scene-setting to explain why they should care, some killer examples or metaphors to bring your story to life, and some preemptive strikes against anticipated counterarguments. Outline what’s changing, what you’re pretty confident will happen and what the critical uncertainties are. Identify the opportunities and risks of alternative future scenarios. Then, land what it all means for your organisation, your plan, and how it will capitalise on the opportunities and mitigate the risks. If time and budget allow, visualise implications and opportunities to make the future tangible. Finally, polish, practice, and pitch it with pizazz.

Strong foresight isn’t the product of a process; it’s more dependent on experience, domain knowledge, and worldly judgement, but I’ve found these 10 principles to be a useful guide and checklist. If you’re looking to raise your leadership team’s foresight game or to stress-test and build alignment around a longer-term initiative, particularly for teams navigating long-horizon bets in mobility, consumer tech or healthcare, I give a limited number of talks a year on building foresight into long-term strategy (no follow-up pitches).

Plan - foresight, vision, leadership

‘A problem well-defined is a problem half solved’

Charles Kettering, (1876-1958), father of seven major American inventions

‘The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.’

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher

‘If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.’

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), scientist

Every design and innovation leader I know is talking about how AI might raise productivity. This concern is understandable when so many projects misfire, and even those that make it to market often involve much wasted effort. The good news is that AI will accelerate many parts of the process, from project research to concept visualisation. However, one of the most significant efficiency gains leaders can make is the very human job of ensuring their teams focus on the right problems, and tackle them in the right way.

A Framing of the problem and a set of Goals for the project form the core of any good innovation brief. Done well, these two things focus each project team member on the right challenge, provide a clear understanding of the problem, and offer a perspective that can guide the whole team to the solution. Done badly, they waste time and resources, fuel frustration and drain energy.

As well as providing a touchstone for the project team, a well-defined brief also helps other interested parties to understand what you aim to achieve and why – building support for the project. Good Framing and Goals are especially critical in new, ambiguous and multifaceted problem areas, as well as early in the process when the cognitive ‘fog’ can be especially dense.

Framing

The importance of a well-diagnosed problem has long been established, but it was only during the 2010s craze for Design Thinking that the term ‘problem framing’ really gained prominence. It made designers sound more strategic, sure, but what does it actually mean? And what makes me so certain that AI will never be able to take over the framing done by human beings.

Like using a camera, Framing provides both perspective and focus. With a camera, we decide what angle to approach the subject and choose what to exclude from the shot. Similarly, a helpful Frame provides a meaningful and action-orientated point of view on the problem at hand and, at the same time, crystallises, clarifies and organises its critical aspects. And, while always guided by insights gained in the past, good Framing ideally provides the team with a fresh lens on the problem.

There are both hard and soft sides to Framing. The rational side often consists of distilling a complex set of issues down to a few critical variables or dimensions, such as a 2×2 matrix or a mental model. The emotive side can be trickier, as it often involves articulating critical but uncomfortable personal or political issues. So, when conversations begin to get near the ‘elephant in the room’, it’s best to name and claim the animal with care. Opening sentences such as ‘It’s probably just me, but…,’ or ‘You’ve probably thought of this already, but…’ may be best here.

Framing is an innate human ability. It relies heavily on capabilities that AI will never have: our experience, affinity, judgement and perspective-taking. Capabilities computers are inherently weak at.

AI is getting better and better at answering our questions, but it will remain our job to pose the right questions.

That said, when we Frame a problem, the resources we can marshal to tackle it influence how we approach it. As I’ve written elsewhere, as AI develops, it will take on more tasks in the innovation process and shape how we approach problems.

‘Most work, after all, is comprised of a mix of tasks: some of which are better suited to us and some of which could one day be done better by machines. As the capabilities of these grow, managers will redesign work to take advantage of the strengths of both their human workers and their automated assistants.’

Kevin McCullagh ‘Human machine interlace’, Perspective 05, July 2018

How human beings Frame projects will change as teams use more AI-assisted tools. For example, if they enable the rapid generation of many options, you may decide to explore a broader range of concepts than before.

See the box at the foot of this article for further discussion on Framing.

A structure for Frames and Goals

Once the problem has been accurately diagnosed and an ambition and angle of attack agreed upon, the next job is to outline some endpoints to the project in the form of Goals. It’s these Goals that define the size and shape of the project and are often heavily influenced by budget and time frame considerations.

Discussing Goals is central to driving clarity at the start of a project, but this is best done around some clearly articulated draft Goals. If the discussion is too free-flowing, and is only recorded on a few quickly scrawled Post-its, the risk of blindspots and misunderstandings is high – even when everyone leaves the room nodding in agreement and raring to go.

Over three decades and hundreds of projects, I’ve developed the following way of structuring Frames and Goals.

I organise this under the following headings:

Context

Written out in a few paragraphs, this is where most of the framing happens. The paragraphs should outline the key elements of the challenge’s background. They should cover the broad business context, important drivers, why the project is being initiated and the assumptions, mental models and metaphors you consider helpful.

Those few summary paragraphs should be pithy and to the point, enabling the team and stakeholders to quickly grasp the project’s ‘why’. This is why using paragraphs is important here. Bullet points just don’t cut it when building a coherent narrative on your point of view on the challenge and how best to approach it.

Ambition

It’s always useful to distil the purpose of the project down into a single sentence. It should be concise and concrete without sounding like a vague wish. To find the right balance between brevity and detail, I typically generate a bunch of variants and, through discussion and iteration, narrow them down to the best statement of ambition.

Scope

This is where we break down different aspects of the challenge into various dimensions, such as: target market segments and geographies, product categories, use domains, touchpoints, business units, and time horizon etc. Often, it’s enough to outline what is in-scope, but sometimes, it’s necessary to clarify which elements of each dimension are out-of-scope.

Objectives

Written statements on each Objective break down the Ambition into the more specific Goals that, when achieved, will see that Ambition fulfilled. We find it helpful to start each Objective statement with a verb such as: Frame, Discover, Generate, Develop, Recommend, and to align these objectives with process steps. The statements should describe what you aim to achieve – not what you will do. For example, ‘Identify three potential disruptions in our market landscape’, not ‘Analyse market trends’. Finally, try to keep the number of Objectives down to between three and five – teams glaze over at the sight of a shopping list of Objectives.

The very act of writing what we think is clear in our heads usually highlights a few holes – then discussing them tends to highlight a few more.

Outcomes

If Objectives are the hard project Goals, Outcomes are the softer, often more important ones. Written statements of Outcomes highlight the desired consequence or impact of the project, and often describe the shifts in attitudes, mindsets and behaviour that will hopefully drive business results. Sometimes known as success criteria, they portray what success will look and feel like.

A good question to ask a client or senior manager is to imagine you’re sitting together in two years’ time: they’re happy, and you’re reminiscing about the project. What changed as a result of the project? What happened along the way to bring about these changes? Encourage them to think about the impacts on themselves, on their team, and on the business.

Three examples of Outcome statements:

The executive team have had their eyes opened and their assumptions positively challenged
The leadership team has developed and aligned around a point of view on which categories to play in
The team feels confident that it has at least one compelling proposition which has the potential to generate high-margin growth

Outputs

These are the specific and tangible ‘deliverables’ the project will produce, as either intermediate or final outputs. They should be as specific as possible to help you clarify with your client or your manager that these Outputs match their expectations. Clear Outputs help you plan the time, resources and budget required to produce them. Examples may include:

One slide of recommendations
Agenda for a two-day workshop, including facilitation and summary
40-slide Foresight presentation
Presentation and half-day workshop in Seoul
Three digital prototypes as stimuli for consumer feedback

Iterate and align

Writing down and aligning teams and stakeholders on project Frames and Goals is time well spent. After all, writing is God’s way of telling us how muddled our thinking is! So, the very act of writing what we think is clear in our heads usually highlights a few holes – then discussing them tends to highlight a few more.

It’s the discussion of goals and their collective crafting that brings clarity, rather than the Goals themselves. Talking it through a few times with the team and stakeholders also helps hone a project’s narrative and iron out inconsistencies.

Once aligned at project kick-off, the Goals should be made accessible in the team’s workspace so that they can easily be referred to as a touchstone for the rest of the project. Whenever I suspect the team is getting stuck in the weeds, I refer to the Goals and ask if and how the current debate is helping us achieve them.

Mid-course correction

Often, the process of reflecting on the Goals mid-way through a project highlights subtle shifts in the team’s understanding of them. As the management thinker, Jon Kay put it:

‘Our objectives are typically imprecise, multifaceted and change as we progress towards them – and properly so’

John Kay, ‘Decision-making, John Kay’s way’, Financial Times, 20 March 2010

If you don’t have the original statement of your Frame and Goals to hand, changes in Objectives often morph without acknowledgement, leading to confusion. As well as helping to clarify mid-course corrections, logging revisions to project Goals also helps with storytelling as you explain to stakeholders how the team progressively homed in on the nub of the problem.

Conclusion

Defining a project’s Frame and Goals is ultimately about providing your team with a useful perspective and focus. Rather than encouraging them to ‘think outside the box’, it channels their creative energies into a productive box to think within. This all requires the profoundly human abilities of judgement and leadership – skills I’m certain will remain a country mile ahead of what any AI bot will ever be able to muster.

Three dimensions of Framing

Framing is a high-level and abstract topic, the nature of which is often hard to articulate. The book Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil does a good job of explaining the process in more depth. I found the authors’ three dimensions of Causality, Counterfactuals, and Constraints particularly insightful.

Causality – thinking about cause and effect

This first dimension of Framing is the most unconscious. We understand the world through cause and effect. Some of those understandings are better than others. For example, some might put a product’s success down to being launched on a lucky date. In contrast, others might locate its fortune in how it anticipated a crucial shift in consumer expectations. Generalising across different situations, we use this causal thinking to make sense of the world and predict the consequences of actions, whether human or performed by technology.

Good leaders have a firm grasp of causality and how things work. They can identify the fundamental forces acting on the problem at hand.

So, how we approach any project challenge is highly informed by our understanding of the forces acting on it. Leaders often express their perspective on a problem with a mental model, metaphor or analogy to make some critical aspects of the problem more relatable. For example, ‘We should try to become the Nespresso of our category’.

Coupled to human agency, causal thinking separates us from AI. We act on the world and experience the effects of those actions – for ourselves, our team, our company, our professional peer group or wider society. So, when we select a Frame, we choose with a sense of responsibility about how we want to reshape things – By contrast, AI has no sense of responsibility and therefore no skin in the project game.

Counterfactuals – alternative solutions

When planning a project, we start to run through a range of possibilities and alternative futures. These we judge in terms of their potential. While project Goals should not suggest a particular solution, consciously framing out – excluding – certain solutions may prove sensible. Considering which directions to Frame in and out helps to bound the project space.

To imagine a range of counterfactuals is a good way to tap into tacit knowledge of how our part of the world works. It helps to surface extra insights from our experience. By integrating alternative routes into our Frame, we encourage the team to remain open-minded, and feel more of a sense of agency as the range of possibilities becomes clearer.

Again, AI is little match for humans when the task is to envision scenarios that do not exist. Reliable training data, the essential basis for AI, is very patchy about the future!

Constraints – creative guide rails

As every designer knows, a blank canvas with unlimited possibilities is the opposite of inspiring. Complete creative freedom is neither feasible, realistic, nor desirable. Charles Eames once said, ‘Design depends largely on constraints’. These cognitive curbs (or kerbs for stateside readers) help guide and focus exploration. Some will be externally imposed, for example, by the laws of physics or our manager’s budget, while others might be self-imposed to avoid well-worn grooves and stimulate new thinking.

One way to make constraints more concrete is to identify different dimensions of the challenge, for example, target markets, and then outline which are in and out of scope. However you define your constraints, one check to run is that they are internally consistent and do not conflict.

Like causal thinking and generating counterfactuals, defining constraints is another very human skill – and one that is much more of an art than science. Doing it well requires a mix of rigorous and creative thinking and experience in framing and solving related problems. Algorithms will not be able to impose discerning constraints any time soon. ‘Computers calculate, but minds imagine’.

‘There are decades in which nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.’

This quote, often attributed to the Russian revolutionary Lenin, captures this epochal moment well. As we start to find our feet after the initial shock of the Corona crisis, innovation leaders are looking to rock from their heels to their toes and figure out how to survive and thrive in the post-crisis world. It’s already clear that the economic and social impact will be more seismic than 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis. How can we start to think about its implications for innovators After Corona?

The common refrain is, ‘This changes everything’, which is an understandable overreaction while we’re in the epicentre of the emergency. But even a cursory familiarity with history would suggest that Corona does not change everything. There will be fundamental changes, temporary changes and much will remain relatively unchanged. Now is the time for innovation leaders to put in the hard yards, to gain enough strategic perspective to divine the most likely trends and separate the changes from the continuities. Then we will be best placed to consider the potential strategic pivots that this level of disruption often demands.

We can’t predict the future, but there are better and worse ways of understanding change. The first pitfall to avoid is projecting our hopes and fears on to the future. While catastrophism (and to a lesser extent wishful thinking) is currently rife in the mainstream and social media, this is a time to keep our heads. We need to find ways to distance ourselves from our unconscious biases and gain a more objective perspective on likely futures. The distinctions and questions below should help structure your thinking, as will collecting data points and ensuring you have differing viewpoints in your strategic team – so as to robustly interrogate your assumptions and hypotheses.

During Corona

It has become common to refer to the time before late 2019 as BC – ‘Before Corona’. But when thinking about the impact of the pandemic, it is also useful to think about DC and AC – During and After Corona. Most commentary on Covid-19’s impact can be filed under DC, much of which risks confusing temporary shifts with far-reaching permanent change.

Innovators mostly plan in years rather than months, so need to distinguish between temporary (DC) and permanent (AC) shifts. We should be wary of the tendency to extrapolate short-term, crisis-driven changes in behaviour indefinitely into the future. For example, the drop-off in podcasts and car usage is likely to rebound rapidly once the lockdown is lifted, and people click back into their commuting and exercise routines. I also doubt if Quarantinis on Zoom will be much of a thing once the bars, cafes and restaurants eventually reopen, as people relish the richness of face-to-face interaction. The tourism industry has faced one of the harshest of blows, and many businesses will go under. But despite the dark publicity around the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined for two weeks off Japan in February, global cruise bookings for 2021 already exceed those of 2019. We should remember that it took three years for global air travel to recover from the 9/11 attacks in 2001 – but global flight passengers numbers had more than doubled by 2019.

While many behaviours and businesses will revert to something like BC norms and patterns post-pandemic, some are likely to change. For example, will wearing a mask when down with a bug and higher hygiene standards become socially de rigueur in the West? Will commuters return to packed public transport systems to BC levels? While not a direct parallel, ridership passenger numbers on the London Underground dipped slightly following the 7/7 bombings in 2005, which targeted London’s underground metro system, but rose by 30% in the following 10 years – although they have started to decline in recent years.

Structural shifts

Before we get onto how to assess if changes are temporary or permanent, we first need to frame some macro social, political and economic shifts, which are likely to set the context for innovation for the next decade or so.

Deglobalisation

While the response to the Corona crisis has in many ways been a model of international scientific collaboration (with the arguable exception of China), collaboration between governments has not fared so well, as each nation has fallen back on its national interests and resources. Transnational organisations such as the EU and the World Health Organisation haven’t had a good crisis. One lesson governments and companies are likely to take from the crisis is that long just-in-time supply chains are too fragile – especially ones which look overly reliant on China. The list of industries considered ‘strategic’ – from agriculture to PPE – will expand and there will be more talk of national self-reliance or ‘economic patriotism’ – but less action, as it becomes clear just how interdependent the global economy is. Many supply chains will be shortened and diversified, including more ‘reshoring’ or ‘nearshoring’ of production, to better withstand future shocks, such as another Eurozone crisis and heightened trade tensions with China.

More state, city and neighbourhood solutions

Governments, many of them right-of-centre, have intervened in their societies and economies to an extent that was unimaginable only months ago. Cities, as dense population centres, have also been at the forefront of lockdown measures, such as NYC laying emergency bike lanes to cater for a surge in cycling as commuters avoid crowded public transport. One of the few silver linings in the pandemic is the revived faith in the local community, as neighbourhood WhatsApp groups sprang up to coordinate support for those in need. In an incredible display of public spirit, 750,000 volunteers answered the call in the UK to support the National Health Service (NHS); the target was 250,000 and recruitment was quickly paused. This heartening rise in social solidarity, which paradoxically was born out of self-isolation, reverses decades of social fragmentation and loss of community bonds. This could change the context of services designed for local communities, such as shared micromobility schemes.

Corporate consolidation

All downturns result in a period of industry concentration, as stronger companies absorb distressed competitors at knock-down prices. The severity of this recession will lead to the mother of all consolidations, with auto and airline sectors looking like top candidates. For example, Daimler’s market cap is now half what it was when Geely bought 10% of its stock in February 2018. However, in further signs of economic nationalism, Germany’s economy minister has called for state investment to defend big German companies from foreign takeovers.

Big Tech is likely to emerge stronger than ever. Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, GoogleHangouts, Netflix and Epic Games (owner of Fortnite and Houseparty) are the obvious DC beneficiaries. Amazon is hiring 100,000+ more employees, as it scales to meet the spike in demand for home deliveries, and has even been called the ‘new Red Cross’. Post-crisis, it will be interesting to assess the status of the ‘Techlash’. It is unlikely that the EU and The Democrats will be quite so keen to pursue Big Tech on privacy and antitrust concerns as the world economy tries to get back on its feet, and Tech is seen as a motor for economic and – critically – job growth.

Equality tensions

Low paid, ‘low skill’ workers have been reframed DC as essential workers and sometimes as heroes, who actually keep society ticking. The vulnerability of gig workers has also been highlighted; they are the first to be cut adrift by businesses with the smallest of safety nets. While more will question why the ‘exam passing classes’ get treated so much better, businesses are likely to continue to cut deeper and look to automate more low-skill tasks.

This will lead to heightened tensions, in which political parties and some brands will take positions on the side of the vulnerable. Gig and ‘Frontline’ workers may also win more legal protections in this climate, which will challenge many service businesses to rethink their business models.

We should try to identify and distinguish between two distinct types of permanent change. First and foremost, there will be pre-existing trends that have been accelerated by the crisis. Second, there will be changes which represent a more fundamental shift in assumptions.

Accelerated change

Most of the permanent changes that will characterise the AC era will be BC trends that were rapidly accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis. For example, Amazon and Walmart may not retain all the hundreds of thousands of extra employees they have hired, but it’s fair to assume that a lot more consumers will be converted to the benefits of online grocery shopping and home delivery AC.

Remote working, learning and medicine

The most obvious example of a boosted trend is that towards white-collar staff working remotely. It’s been growing for years, but Covid-19 has been the great accelerator. Some companies will go virtual AC. Most will return to the office, but more workers will be practised in alternative ways of collaborating, such as via Slack or Asana, rather than face-to-face meetings. Equally, they are likely to value the more social elements of office life as an antidote to working in isolation. Finance directors and facilities managers, meanwhile, will have other considerations in mind as they adapt to even leaner times. The need for personal desk space and business travel will be questioned, after the team has proved so productive from home. Office space requirements are likely to be trimmed, as will rents, as commercial landlords adapt to disrupted demand.

Kids have been socialising remotely on Minecraft and Fortnite for a while, and have quickly adopted remote learning on Google classroom. The evidence behind ‘screen-time shaming’ was always thin, but the range of things kids did on screens during lockdown may prompt parents to feel less anguish about it. The Corona homeschooling experiment will open the door for EdTech companies to show parents what else can be done.

The massive push Covid-19 has given telemedicine may be one of the biggest lasting consequences of the crisis. As the quaint nineties term suggests (remember Telecottaging anyone?), the concept of doctors remotely visiting patients has been around a while, but hadn’t taken off. A survey in 2019 found that only 8% of US patients have had virtual visits from their doctor. Covid-19 has swept away many health and privacy regulatory barriers, along with doctor and patient resistance, in a matter of weeks. As John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital made clear at a conference in March, ‘We are doing more virtual visits in a given day than we did the entire proceeding year, so things can change… I don’t see us going back to the way things were’.

Automation surge?

Some economists point to previous recessions being catalysts for automation surges, as extreme economic dislocation forces industries to restructure and invest in labour-saving technology to reap new efficiencies. In the case of the Corona recession, an extra case might be made for machines, in that they can work cheek-by-jowl 24/7 during a pandemic. Whether this recession and recovery will follow previous patterns is far from clear, but if the level of state intervention and job support programmes continue, there may be more pressure on companies to re-employ people, rather than re-invest in capital intensive technology and lead a disruptive industry transformation.

Micromobility and public transport

While public transport and micromobility have been hit hard DC, their AC prospects are likely to diverge – and for related reasons. Densely packed public transport was quickly identified as a risk; as people cut down on their movements (and shared handlebars), micromobility took a hit too, as many operators shuttered or withdrew their services from cities around the world. However, as lockdowns lift, more citizens are likely to try out micromobility alternatives to public transport, and take advantage of extra bike lanes that have been rolled out DC. Others may follow Chinese preferences for private cars – with high-quality air filters – although cities may use the crisis to introduce further restrictions on cars.

Game-changing shifts

While most of the change will involve the acceleration of existing trends, some shifts will be genuine volte-faces and step-changes that were not on the cards BC.

Heightened hygiene

Attitudes to hygiene are likely to be among the most obvious new changes. We have all upped our hand-washing game and it may become socially responsible for Westerners to adopt the habit of wearing masks in public spaces when down with a bug. South-East Asians adopted this after the SARS outbreak (2003), and the habit was reinforced by the Swine Flu (2009) and MERS (2015) epidemics.

This heightened hygiene sensitivity will wane, but to a higher base level of stringency than BC. Cleaning of public spaces and shared interfaces will not only become more prominent – but will need to be seen to be done. The smell of disinfectant may well become a welcome reassurance. The air ventilation and filtration systems in new buildings and vehicles will also come under more scrutiny. Designers will be asked to design ‘clean’. Industrial, and Colour, Materials and Finish (CMF) designers will need to develop deep expertise in self-cleaning and antimicrobial surfaces for the likes of touchscreens, handles and handlebars. One study of hygiene in air travel found 10 times more contaminants on touchscreens at the check-in kiosks than on toilet seats. Interaction designers will also be asked to explore more ‘Zero touch’ or ‘Zero UI’ user interfaces.

Digital surveillance

BC there was a growing push-back against what Shoshana Zuboff dubbed Surveillance capitalism, where private firms capitalised on our ‘digital exhaust’ – the information trails of our behaviours and preferences that we create online. AC there is likely to be acceptance of more state-sponsored surveillance. South Korea has been lauded for how well it initially contained the epidemic, with a range of measures including highly effective contact tracing. What has been less widely commented upon is that these relied on accessing the public’s mobile phone, CCTV and credit card data – without a warrant.

As governments around the world scramble to develop exit strategies, contact tracing apps are likely to play a central role. As emergency powers introduced during crises have a tendency of becoming the new normal, critical decisions are being made right now that seek to balance public health and privacy considerations. The Chinese app, AliPay Health Code, which opaquely assigns users a red, yellow or green health status and is then used to limit their freedom, is clearly not the way to go. Apple and Google’s joint announcement (yes, these are indeed unprecedented times) on OS updates, to enable private Bluetooth-based contact tracing, is a big step forward. As is the DP-3T basic code for a privacy-first contact tracing app, developed by 25 scientists across eight European universities. The privacy context that digital product designers will be working in is moving quickly.

Resilience over optimisation

‘Lean’ and ‘optimisation’ were two keywords in business BC. While this modus operandi may have suited steady-state conditions, systems designed in this way tend to get exposed by shocks. For example, highly specialised Just-in-time global supply chains prevalent in the automotive industry quickly ground to a halt when factories and ports in China closed.

The AC business world will still value efficiency, but more consideration will be given to the system’s resilience, as we acknowledge that other pandemics could well be part of our future. Workflows will be redesigned to be better able to function when more people are off sick or self-isolating. Teams will be better set up to work remotely. Many workplaces will be adapted to better cope with a future need to physically distance. Words like redundancy, contingency and ‘Anti-fragile’ will feature in more system design principles.

Build foresight

Not all of the shifts mentioned above will be relevant to you, nor will all of the others that are likely to fill the media over the next month or so. At Plan we encourage our clients to identify and focus on a few key factors that could potentially shape the context in which your business will operate AC. This will provide a firm base from which to drive the development of your strategy.

Given that most of the big changes will come from accelerated pre-existing trends, it is important to focus on those things which are most relevant to and will impact on your business, rather than becoming preoccupied with shiny new trends pedalled by the media and ‘Futurists’. It is usually more insightful to get under the surface of recent developments in an important dynamic that existed BC, rather than to get distracted by every hot new fad.

Once you have listed the key driving forces impacting on your business, give the list more meaning by mapping them on some common axes, to highlight inter-relationships. Plotting these dimensions of your sector’s future landscape will be useful to map scenarios and test concepts against later. Also, remember to include key continuities in your assumption base – those factors you expect to remain relatively unchanged.

You can then develop different scenarios based on these assumptions, that represent alternative potential futures. Ideally, you should build four scenarios, positioned on common axes; avoid offering only three scenarios to remove the temptation that gives senior management to plump for the middle one! Use scenario planning frameworks if you like, but robust scenarios do not assemble themselves; they require you to make many judgement calls. That’s fine – just be explicit about what these judgement calls are and the basis on which you have made them.

However you structure them, the scenarios should address the following questions:

What is changing, and what is driving this change?
What risks and opportunities do these changes bring?
How can your organisation best gain from this potential situation?

Ultimately, the scenarios should be judged by how credible, coherent, compelling, and commercial your organisation finds the stories about how it will prosper in the AC world.

History in fast-forward

Covid-19 does not change everything, but it has flicked history into fast-forward. It is a great accelerator of many BC trends, and it has spurred a worldwide rush of innovation and experimentation. Innovation leaders are not oracles and cannot predict the future, but it is our responsibility to develop a solid perspective on change and continuity in our industries. We need to plan and act today, if we are to best position our organisations to survive and thrive After Corona.

10 Innovation strategy questions for After Corona

As a follow-up to the article above, this 5 minute questionnaire clicks down to 10 practical questions you should ask when planning your innovation strategy for 2021 and beyond.

Subscribe to future content from Plan here, and my previous articles can be found here.

Where possible, managers should base decisions on reputable data. When it comes to investing in new product development, market research offers forecasts, scores and percentage points. But in his fascinating new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking ‘author, journalist, cultural commentator and intellectual adventurer’, Malcolm Gladwell argues that it is, in fact, the first two seconds in many encounters that count far more than you would ever imagine. For creatives who live and die by their instincts, Blink casts valuable light on the pros and cons of trusting your gut. Gladwell makes clear that instincts can be both on the money or wildly off the mark. For example, relationship psychologists can review a 15-minute video of a married couple talking, and predict, with 90 per cent accuracy, whether they will still be married in 15 years’ time.

On the flip side, he recounts the tale of how Warren Harding, America’s worst-ever president, ascended the political ladder purely by making good first impressions. Like in his previous book The Tipping Point, Blink is based on well-researched and well-told stories from wildly eclectic fields: from speed dating to war games, and jam tasting to racial prejudice. Unlike The Tipping Point, this book moves beyond the merely descriptive to some genuine insights. The passage on the two-way street between facial expressions and emotions is enthralling. Although he sometimes lazily falls into computer analogies, the book paints vivid sketches of the inner workings of our minds. In most situations we apparently work best when we don’t process much information, but focus on ‘thin slices’ of vital information to spot familiar patterns.

Blink investigates the influence of ‘gut instincts’ and snap judgements in all walks of life. Here I focus on the lessons Gladwell draws from the stories of New Coke and the ‘Aeron’ office chair.

The New Coke disaster

In the early eighties market research indicated that Pepsi was gaining fast of the once dominant Coke, in terms of the number on consumers who said that they exclusively drank each brand – even though Coke had far better distribution and was spending $100m more on advertising. Pepsi were running their ‘Pepsi challenge’ campaign, in which 57% of people preferred their product in ‘blind sip’ tests.

‘The story of New Coke… is a really good illustration of how complicated it is to find out what people really think’

Coke decided that they had a problem with taste and tasked the men in white coats with tinkering with the fabled secret Coke formula. They made it lighter and sweeter – more like Pepsi – until it tested better than Pepsi in blind tests. In a massive round of consumer testing in 1984 New Coke beat Pepsi in sip tests by 6-8%. At the press conference announcing its launch, the then CEO Roberto C. Goizueta called the new product ‘the surest move that company’s ever made’. New Coke was such a disaster, it provoked protests and forced Coke to bring back the original formula as Coke Classic – at which point New Coke sales evaporated. The biggest surprise was yet to come… Pepsi’s predicted catch-up never happened. Coke remained the world’s favourite cola.

Coke’s error was to believe the sip test. More realistic studies, which involved taking a case of cans home and drinking them over a number of weeks, showed very different results – Coke clearly came out on top. Gladwell argues that there are sensory and psychological explanations. Pepsi is sweeter and tastes good to many after a sip, but less appealing after drinking a whole can. Also, consuming the product at home is a more realistic context to reach a reflective decision. Finally, there is the more subtle influence of ‘sensation transference’, the concept that people convey impressions of the brand, including packaging, onto the product. For a brand like Coke, people make no distinction between the product and the packaging – ‘the product is the package and product combined’.

The reason the sip test results didn’t translate into real world sales, is that ‘in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind. We transfer to our sensation of the Coca-Cola taste all of the unconscious associations we have of the brand, the image, the can, and even the unmistakable red of the logo’. The lesson here is the develop an understanding of an issue’s context, before deciding on what the key parameters are that can be quantified through market research.

Aeron against the odds

The story of the ‘Aeron’ office chair illustrates a second, deeper problem with trying to measure people’s reactions: it is hard for us to explain our feelings about unfamiliar things. In the early nineties the renowned industrial designer Bill Stumpf, started work on his third task chair for Herman Miller. His previous ‘Ergon’ and ‘Equa’ had been successful, but Stumpf wanted to design the ultimate in ergonomic comfort. The result ‘looked like the exoskeleton of a giant prehistoric insect’. In 1992 Herman Miller tested them with local companies and asked each person to use them for half a day and then rate it out of 10 on comfort and appearance. The early prototypes scored badly. After some prototype development, comfort scores reach eight, but those for aesthetics never reached six. This was unusual, as experience has shown that consumers strongly relate comfort and looks. Generally, if people like the chair in the first ‘blink’, they will perceive it as comfortable – and vice versa.

In 1993, Herman Miller ran some pre-launch expert tests. Architects and designers, who might specify the chair, generally liked it – they understood why the chair was radical. However, facilities managers and ergonomic experts, the final purchasing decision makers, hated it – for mainly aesthetic reasons. Herman Miller trusted its instincts and launched the product. Before long it won design awards and got adopted by cutting edge creative and technology companies – ‘it matched the stripped-down aesthetic of the new economy’. By the end of the nineties, it became the best selling chair in Herman Miller’s history and scored eight for aesthetics – ugly had become beautiful!

Testing consumer reactions to the Aeron, failed for a different reason than those to New Coke. This was less a misunderstanding of context, than consumers misinterpreting their feelings. While they said they hated it, what they actually meant was that they didn’t understand it – they thought it was weird. The lesson here is that testing innovative products has to be handled very carefully and reactions need interpretation. If the Aeron has been a minor variation of what had gone before, consumer testing would have been far more straightforward.

The wisdom of experts

Deconstructing what happens in the first two seconds of ‘rapid cognition’ is near impossible, as it is a product of our unconscious – the part of our thinking that is outside our awareness. Gladwell advises against trying to explain snap judgements by asking consumers to remember, deconstruct and describe why they reached a decision. While Blink is long on problems and short on solutions, Gladwell does make a positive suggestion here; by drawing a distinction between consumer and expert instinct. He argues that instincts without experience in the subject matter should not be trusted. Whereas, expert instincts are fined tuned to get at the ‘gestalt’ or the essence of a subject: ‘with experience we become expert at using our behaviour and our training to interpret – and decode – what lies behind our snap judgements and first impressions.’ By definition experts spend a lot of time studying, reflecting and developing a precise vocabulary on their subject; and as a result they build a rich subconscious database’. In comparison consumer reactions tend to be shallow, as they are not grounded in real understanding.

Managers should still look to base investment decisions on data, but should ensure it is reputable. To do this they must understand the context, before working out what can be realistically measured; and include expert opinion into their assessment, especially when the product in question is innovative.

Fear and loathing of China is ratcheting up in design land. But, says Kevin McCullagh, its boom is down to risk-taking and energy rather than ripping off Western ideas.

Becoming a workshop of the world was one thing, but China’s newfound status as the counterfeit capital of the world strikes designers closer to home.

After all, in our post-industrial knowledge economy we creatives are supposed to live on the thin air of ideas. Companies are also becoming more vigilant in protecting their ‘creative capital’. In defence of its ownership of Eames’ chair designs, Vitra used European copyright laws to force a Malaysian manufacturer to remove items similar to the Aluminium Chair from its stand at Orgatec.

Fakery has become a multi-billion dollar, globalised business, far beyond phoney Rolexes and Louis Vuittons. General Motors and Toyota have fought piracy cases in China involving whole cars, and the European Commission claims that counterfeit goods cost 100,000 European jobs a year. Two-thirds of counterfeits seized in Europe come from Asia, with the minority being of Chinese origin.

So should designers – who might have previously enjoyed the high-quality, but forbidden fakes of Shanghai’s Xiangyang market – begin to see cheap imitations in a more sinister light? Is a bit of harmless bargain hunting actually robbing designers of what is rightfully theirs? Are Chinese copycats stealing our jobs?

To take the issue seriously, we must untangle rights and cultural and economic factors. Let’s begin with the principle of intellectual property rights (IPR). The essence of copyright is the granting of a limited, state-enforced monopoly to protect innovators, so promoting innovation for the wider social good.

In a defining speech to the British Parliament in 1841, when the issue of copyright was being hammered out, Thomas Macaulay sharply defined the balance of interests: ‘It is good that authors should be remunerated and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly, yet monopoly is an evil for the sake of the good. We must submit to the evil, but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.’ Hold that thought – IPRs are a necessary evil, to be tolerated as long as they promote social progress through more innovation.

Let’s now bring to mind some real cultural differences. China is an industrial culture – making is a way of life for many Chinese. There are more mobile phone manufacturers in China than the rest of the world put together. By contrast, the West can be seen as a litigious society – if in doubt, sue. Business contract law is viewed as a Western concept in China, where guanxi – doing deals within a network of known associates – is traditionally the way business is done. Another pivotal difference is the contrasting attitudes to risk-taking. For the time and budget a Western company spends on an investment risk assessment, its Chinese counterpart will have tooled-up and have first production prototypes to assess.

Let’s also nail the myth that there is something innate to China about the counterfeiting boom. This condescending and self-aggrandising fiction used to be pitched at Japan in the Seventies, and Korea in the Nineties, before they went on to become industry leaders.

Copying is a well-rehearsed stage for developing economies. The Design Council’s director of design and innovation Richard Eiserman puts it succinctly: ‘It took Japan 30 years to catch-up, Korea 15 and China five’. So the counterfeit boom is the transitionary phase to China’s maturity as an innovation leader. And let’s not forget the unpaid copyright backlog in the other direction, when Enlightenment Europe was in catch-up mode – paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass are all Chinese inventions. As for Western jobs, it’s not a simple trade-off. In the past 20 years, as Europe de-industrialised, its workforce has grown by 20 per cent. Also, many companies only make their profits by sub-contracting manufacturing to China.

As more homegrown brands are developed there is increasing pressure from Chinese firms to see that IPR is enforced

Shanghai is now a global creative hub, and the number of Chinese mobile phone patents has tripled in the past three years. As more homegrown brands are developed and IP generated, there is increasing pressure from Chinese companies to see that IPR is enforced.

So how should we assess the ethics of buying copies? I suggest we follow Macaulay: is innovation and social progress served, or stifled? Ripping-off new designs from the Milan furniture fair is a different matter from reproducing a classic. In the first case, the innovator is robbed of their chance to earn a fair return on their investment. In the second, say when Vitra charge £1,100 for a piece designed 50 years ago, most of humanity is denied the chance to own a beautiful chair, decades after its innovator died. Who, here, is ripping off who?

I conclude that it’s international IP law that needs an overhaul, not China. China’s boom is not driven by cheap labour and ripping-off Western ideas, but by its energy, investment, and risk-taking. We should celebrate its awesome production potential to deliver great design to the masses, not call the lawyer.