Understanding the future is about having the right map.
How to relate more effectively to the future…
1 See the landscape. Use a wide lens to see and become familiar with the complex landscape of change that surrounds you.
2 Attune to emergence. Develop an openness to the emerging future and become fluent in the ideas and perceptions needed to grasp it.
3 Choose and actualize. Use a narrow lens to bring your own future into sharp focus and use it as a motivational magnet.
Future fluency means effectively seeing, understanding, and focusing your probable future.
A successful journey needs a good map…
Synthesys is a futures analysis consultancy based in Cambridge, UK.
Situations requiring future-focused decisions are typically complex, with incomplete information, high levels of change, and ambiguity (VUCA). This calls for a holistic picture-forming and pattern recognition approach that can compensate for uncertainty. Strategy and tactical agility then become a perceptual skill based on the development of a comprehensive integrated picture of the strategic environment or landscape. Comprehensive – meaning that all the salient and most important features are included; and integrated – meaning they have been combined or synthesised into a meaningful whole.
This approach leads to insights that inform and improve your decision making, planning and strategy. Your operating landscape comes into focus, which deepens your understanding of strategic choices. Future change, and its strategic implications, become more easily visible.
Synthesys’ experience spans a wide range of corporate and government clients in many parts of the world over more than 30 years. This experience includes strategy and policy formulation, organizational learning, new business models, product and service design, and strategic communications. This boundary-crossing breadth of perspective, plus the richness and depth of experience are key sources of Synthesys’ ability to find a path forward.
Clients include corporate, government, and non-profit organizations internationally. Engagements span advising leaders and decision makers, designing and facilitating futures thinking and strategy workshops, and conducting futures research; as well as keynote presentations on the future and executive education programs on holistic futures thinking and its role in strategy.