Forward Faster by Design
VIRTUAL SERIES
Join our monthly innovation event in Charlotte
Forward Faster is a monthly event series in which we explore how Human-Centered Design can fuel business, civic, and social innovation. The one-hour sessions are typically a mix of brief presentations and/or discussions with local innovation practitioners followed by small group conversations. Now in its fifth year, Forward Faster has morphed into a virtual forum where people from a wide variety of backgrounds "collide and connect" with others who share an interest in creativity, innovation, and design. If this sounds like your kind of tribe, make plans to join us at an upcoming event.
Learning from the Future: Using Strategic Foresight to Plan for Tomorrow
Friday, October 9th, 2020
8:00 AM - 9:00 AM ET
$10 for General Admission
$5 for Education, Government, and Non-Profit employees
For most organizations, strategic planning has always been about charting a course for the future with imperfect information. But in the face of extraordinary upheaval and uncertainty due to impacts of the pandemic, our traditional planning tools seem insufficient. In addition, due in part to our automatic ‘fight or flight’ response to threats, it’s easy to rationalize focusing solely on short-term survival at the expense of long-term planning. And if that weren’t enough, working remotely makes it even harder to do the sort of collaborative critical thinking necessary for effective strategic planning. So what can we do?
In our next Forward Faster by Design session, we’ll explore how we can make use of tools from the discipline of strategic foresight. As J. Peter Scoblic describes in his HBR article, Learning from the Future, the objective of strategic foresight is “not to predict the future but rather to make it possible to imagine multiple futures in creative ways” to guide our decision making in the present. With help from our friend and Crisis Management expert, Vanessa Mathews, we’ll discuss how we can combine tools, such as Scenario Planning, with virtual collaboration techniques to develop flexible strategic plans in the age of COVID-19.
As we discussed in our September Forward Faster session, to better prepare ourselves for the threats and opportunities that lie ahead, we need to institutionalize imagination. Embracing the tools of strategic foresight can help us do just that.
Special Guest
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Are We Solving the Right Problems?
Friday, November 13th, 2020
8:00 AM - 9:00 AM ET
$10 for General Admission
$5 for Education, Government, and Non-Profit employees
How much time, money, and energy do we waste solving the wrong problems? As if that weren't bad enough, building a great bridge only to discover it's over the wrong river is demoralizing to everyone involved. But what if we could get better at identifying the right problems to solve?
We'll explore these questions and more at our next Forward Faster by Design event on Oct. 9th. We'll dig into some of the factors, like prior knowledge and anchoring bias, that influence how we define the challenges we face. We'll also share specific techniques for framing (or reframing) problems more effectively so we can better invest our most precious resources in service of the people, organizations, and communities we care about.
