Challenging your existing thinking
Organizational life can make this difficult. So, if you want your team to change its thinking, here are some lessons I learned from our hack events:
- Have a clear structure. Creative chaos is good; chaos on its own isn’t. Let your participants know they are going on a carefully planned journey, even if you don’t know the final destination.
- Get the widest mix of people in the room as possible. Surround yourself with people who have different visions, ages, backgrounds and so on. One of the futurists we worked with in Berlin had eaten nothing but nutritionally modified soil for a year.
- Come prepared. At each hack, we worked with more than 150 drivers of change and 8 clear hypotheses about the future — all plausible, researched and evidenced. That meant people had something to sink their teeth into.
- Be speedy. This kind of idea generation is about agile sprints; if you tried to do it slowly, it would take forever. So get out of your comfort zone, but stay focused on delivering.
- Fail fast and learn. Think of your ideas as prototypes. Get used to uncertainty, incomplete data and untested assumptions. Don’t wait until everything is perfect. Iterate and edit your ideas — improve what works and kill what doesn’t, so you end up with something unexpected and useful. This may be the hardest part.
- Go wild, but not crazy. The aim is to imagine plausible futures and understand the clear, actionable implications for your business today — not to come up with plot ideas for future episodes of Black Mirror. Control the things you need to control (people, place, location, timings, inputs), and let the things you don't need to control happen.
The hack weeks took our participants — and me — on quite a journey. I experienced complacency, healthy skepticism, creative challenge, excitement and many “aha” moments. But the results were fantastic. The leader of a global consumer product goods company said to me, “I never expected to walk away with such a transformational view of the consumer.”
Summary
To prepare for the future consumer, you need a diverse team who are empowered to innovate and experiment.