Where will your business be in six months? Two years? A decade? What challenges will emerge, and what opportunities might you seize? And more than anything, how can your business plan for an unpredictable future?
Most organisations default to risk assessments and scenario planning. But some are discovering a bolder approach: using creativity and immersion to imagine what’s possible - and how to navigate it.
For IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy, strategic futuring offers an essential way of turning tomorrow’s possibilities into today’s experiences. At COP28, the consultancy helped leaders envision and explore three distinct climate futures through interactive environments. At the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s summit, it staged a home from 2030 to illustrate how environmental regulations and cultural shifts could transform daily life.
This shift - from analysing the future to prototyping it - can help organisations unlock new perspectives for more effective planning. Handling tangible artefacts or walking through potential scenarios replaces abstraction with engagement.
The result? Teams move beyond what is and instead imagine what could be, sparking richer discussions about what are possible and clearer paths toward preferred futures.
Sparking conversations
“Strategic futuring is essentially about looking for signals in the world and trying to work out what might be coming,” says Natalia Vasquez, a leader in strategic futures and IDEO alumni. “You can do it in a theoretical abstract way, or you can bring in visual or tangible representations to help businesses have richer conversations. Ultimately, we are showing leaders what is possible to fire up their imaginations and encourage them to think differently about the future.”
For 40 years, IDEO has helped the world’s leading organisations make better decisions about tomorrow, often with remarkable foresight.
In 2005, two years before the iPhone launch, IDEO partnered with Intel to create a short film depicting the hyperconnected, on-demand lifestyle we all know and live today. In 2010, the consultancy anticipated the need to verify legitimacy on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By 2015, they were collaborating with Ikea to envision the ‘future kitchen,’ exploring how augmented reality and multi-sensory digital content could seamlessly integrate into homes.
The final Ikea exhibit, staged at the Salone Del Mobile in Milan, offered a tangible vision of this future, helping the company’s leaders to better understand, anticipate and adapt to the implications of technological shifts.
IDEO’s approach to strategic futuring is informed by both its client partnerships and its own legacy of innovation. Its global teams include experts in graphic design, business management, sustainability and behavioural psychology, all united by a designer’s mindset.
It’s a differentiator that enables the firm to not only help leaders identify possible challenges but also to help prototype and tackle them iteratively. But to do so requires businesses to ask the right questions of themselves in order to make better predictions and turn insights into bold, actionable strategies for the future.
A vision of imagination and rigour
When advising clients on strategic foresight, Vasquez emphasises that the first step is crafting a vision that is both inspiring and grounded in imagination and rigour - never an empty gesture. Leaders must carefully consider both the most likely future scenarios and the ideal ones.
“The idea is to focus on the right choices, in service of where they want to go, and to make such choices with confidence,” she explains.
To succeed, leaders must also rise above the noise of today’s disputes. The best futures often require deep collaboration, but aligning globally distributed teams or those engaged in complex work can be challenging.
“Getting people on the same page can feel like an insurmountable challenge, but the suspension of belief that futuring provides can help,” says Vasquez.
Thriving in the future also means accounting for forces beyond an organisation’s control: climate events, cultural shifts (both seen and unseen) and emerging technologies like AI. Even seemingly unrelated forces can have profound implications.
Here, strategic futuring provides a critical lens. Rigorous speculation, grounded in signals and data, helps cut through the noise to identify what truly matters - even when it’s unexpected.
“At IDEO, we sustain an ongoing signal scanning practice, taking notice of what’s shifting across industries and cultures,” says Lorenz Korder, managing director at IDEO. “We blend that informed sense of what’s coming with our client partners’ insights and data to build a rich tapestry of foresight. And then we employ all the crafts of design—from engineering and environments to software development and storytelling—to give life to the visions of the future that result.”
In a world of uncertainty, strategic foresight isn’t just preparation - it’s a way to inspire action and align teams around what’s possible.
Bringing your findings to life
IDEO’s partnership with consumer electronics leader Logitech showcases how strategic futuring can drive bold solutions. Tasked with exploring innovative ways to reduce waste and counter climate change, IDEO approached the challenge with imagination and rigour.
The stakes were clear: as of 2019, e-waste was the fastest-growing waste stream globally, with only 20% of 48.5 million tonnes properly disposed of. Meanwhile, global emissions must be halved by 2030 to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.
Our rigour helped us focus on long-term sustainability and pushed us past immediate technical feasibility to ask if new ideas would be viable for entire systems
Logitech asked the IDEO team to investigate a broad array of possible futures affected by climate change and report back. Instead of delivering a more traditional presentation on circular solutions, IDEO brought its findings to life by turning them into a board game that senior staff and stakeholders could play together to ignite discussions.
“That imagination mattered,” says Korder. “It fueled an exploration into expertise we collected from researching with people already living in futures destined to expand.”
By blending creativity with deep research, IDEO was able to uncover more possibilities and identify critical intersections.
“Our rigour helped us focus on long-term sustainability and pushed us past immediate technical feasibility to ask if new ideas would be viable for entire systems,” Korder explains.
The result was a fresh perspective on innovation - one that prioritised sustainability, systems thinking and solutions designed to make an immediate and long-lasting impact.
Prescient immersion
Sometimes, the outputs of strategic futuring take physical form, immersing participants in vivid representations of possible futures. At the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2023 Circular Economy Summit, IDEO brought the year 2030 to life, staging a home filled with personal items and objects that reflected a future world shaped by shifting access to natural resources and evolving environmental regulations.
Immersion can play an important role in turning the potential into the tangible. At COP28 in Dubai, IDEO created three distinct worlds reflecting our collective climate future, traversing continents, cultures, economic realities, and societal roles.
“We invited people to step directly into these futures – into spaces suspended deliberately between reality and possibility,” says Vasquez. “The aim of these shared experiences is always to spark an emotional reaction that gets people thinking. It’s also about creating a neutral playground where ideas can be discussed.”
To date, IDEO has delved into the future of automobility, manufacturing, circular retail, connected intimacy, and blockchain, as well as complex human experiences like ageing and citizenship. These “what-ifs” are not abstract thought experiments. Rather, they are urgent queries and examinations about what kind of world we want to inhabit and the choices we need to make today in order to get there.
The aim of these shared experiences is always to spark an emotional reaction that gets people thinking
This matters more than ever at a time when the world is approaching crucial tipping points around climate change and AI. Both trends are likely to lead to seismic changes in the years ahead, raising questions about how society will function. Businesses will naturally need to prepare themselves for this uncertainty, which is where strategic futuring can offer an edge.
“You may be a leader striving to distill many levers of change affecting your organisation,” says Korder. “You may be part of a team that needs to find positive alignment around your next era of growth, or you might be a leader determined to understand how your business may be transformed by forces far beyond your influence. Wherever you are today, strategic futuring can help you make your own tomorrow.”
Strategic futuring ensures that imagination and creativity remain essential in any future-gazing thinking a business may undertake for itself. By retaining a sense of playfulness and exploration, leaders can spark bold ideas, align their teams and actively shape futures filled with possibility, rather than passively reacting to what lies ahead.
For more information, please visit: ideo.com
Where will your business be in six months? Two years? A decade? What challenges will emerge, and what opportunities might you seize? And more than anything, how can your business plan for an unpredictable future?
Most organisations default to risk assessments and scenario planning. But some are discovering a bolder approach: using creativity and immersion to imagine what’s possible - and how to navigate it.
For IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy, strategic futuring offers an essential way of turning tomorrow’s possibilities into today’s experiences. At COP28, the consultancy helped leaders envision and explore three distinct climate futures through interactive environments. At the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s summit, it staged a home from 2030 to illustrate how environmental regulations and cultural shifts could transform daily life.
