Using futures landscapes for strategy, policy and innovation

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Scenarios are not the only way in which organisations can get a handle on how the future may evolve, and what they should do about it. In this short interview, our Director of Futures, Andrew Curry, talks about the “futures landscapes” approach, which creates a dynamic map of the external environment and seems to make it easier for people to reach decisions about how best to act in response. The interview is by Leanna Siron.

What is the ‘futures landscape’ method and how does it help clients identify insights?

The ‘futures landscape’ approach does, more or less, what it says on the tin. Once you have identified the system you’re interested in, it draws on drivers of change and emerging issues to build up a picture of the emerging patterns within the overall landscape, and captures these as subsystems or domains. 

I know that all sounds a bit technical, so to give an example from a project we did on the future of the urban food environment, the six domains that emerged were about ‘climate ready foods’ and the shift to less meat in diets; ‘fragmenting food consumers’, around greater market segmentation and personalisation; ‘profitable purpose’, about how food companies were responding to change; ‘changing views on inequality’, about the wider economic context; a domain about placemaking, and the management of the High Street (Main Street); and ‘Health in the Chain’, about the financial costs of poor food for the environment and public health.

Every futures landscape is different–it emerges from the drivers and emerging issues–but effectively what you get is a model of what’s going on in your external environment, and you can then explore what this means for you. You can think of it as looking at a system–your system–but with the element of time built into it.

How does it differ from using scenarios to identify insights?

Scenarios represent multiple possible futures, each of which are supposed to be distinctively different and internally coherent. The futures landscape, in contrast, offers you a single picture of what’s changing in your overall landscape. Often, that can be a messy picture–some of the domains can be fighting with each other–and each of the domains tends to have a positive and a negative side, which helps to identify opportunities and risks. In general, we’ve found that people find the futures landscape easier to work with than scenarios–I think it’s closer to the way that people think about what’s going on in the world.

Can you share examples where the ‘futures landscape’ method revealed unexpected opportunities or challenges for clients?

Some of the examples are to do with organisation strategy or innovation, and so the detail has to remain confidential. In the futures of foods project, the sheer cost that the food sector imposes in terms of health meant that it raised interesting policy questions about reducing the negative impact of the food market which went beyond regulation. A project for a European technology innovation organisation identified a bit of blind spot about the speed at which Global South countries were innovating in their area, and what that meant for partnerships. In one innovation project I did for a chemicals company using this approach, someone asked if you could use the paint on the walls of offices to clean the air. It turned out that someone in their labs had been working on this but hadn’t managed to get the company’s interest.  

What type of projects are suitable for this approach?

In general, it sits well with projects that are about policy, strategy and innovation, and it’s probably better suited to shorter term futures—say, five to ten years. But I noticed that a report was released recently by CIBSE (the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers) that uses the approach to look out to 2050, and that seems to have produced intriguing insights about the future of buildings. That research was led by NGFP Fellow Charlie Warwick. 

Where would I go if I wanted to find out more?

The method isn’t well written up yet, although I am involved in writing a journal article about it at the moment. But the reason that I used the project on the futures of food environments as an example is that it is published online as a report, so looking through that gives an idea of how it works in practice.