How Challenge Factory uses strategic foresight to empower future-focused institutions
The client:
- Post-secondary medical and research institution
The challenge:
- Typical strategic planning processes can’t anticipate global pandemics, wholesale shifts in how people work, the impact of climate change, or unpredictable supply chains and labour markets.
- Diverse and complex issues—from questions about workspace design to cross-faculty facilitation and alignment—can pull focus away from overall strategic planning efforts.
- Leadership teams need new tools, approaches, and cross-disciplinary supports that can help them create, communicate, implement, and measure the impact of future-focused strategies in an environment rife with uncertainty.
- Employees need to know how their work contributes to the overall success of their organization. Without this understanding, employee engagement, retention, and workplace culture all suffer.
Who we helped:
- The institution’s provosts, leadership teams, deans, faculty members and administrative staff
The solution:
Our client initially came to us for help answering the following types of questions: “What policies do we need to get through the pandemic?” “Should we force people to return to labs for courses that we’ve learned how to teach online?” “How do we navigate the politics of strong feelings on both sides of this shift in educational approach?”
These questions are very common. They speak to the institution’s deep commitment to creating great experiences in education for their employees and students. But answering these questions, and only these questions, often doesn’t solve underlying challenges or create future-focused organizations that are ready to shape their own Future of Work.
Creating the type of change and impact that this institution wanted meant aligning their core organizational values with the work and workplace experiences that their people have every day. It’s important to remember that culture is set from the top, but experienced in day-to-day interactions.
- We led senior leaders through a visioning activity that identified their core values and had them guide key decisions to address current uncertainty and disruption. We also grounded this process in what has made the institution successful in the past, creating a sense of control, predictability, and consistency that could be passed to all employees.
- We worked with department chairs and deans within the institution to uncover hidden needs, fears, and dreams for the future and tied them to concrete topics about careers, workspaces, engagement, and more. We used formal assessment tools as well as listening campaigns.
- We identified who across the complex institution needed to be part of the strategic planning process and facilitated bringing groups of people together who would normally do their planning on their own.
- We used strategic foresight techniques to identify various future scenarios that could be possible. With our guidance and facilitation, leaders gathered evidence to support selected scenarios, building roadmaps complete with hypotheses and success criteria to help navigate several possible paths.
- We supported the leadership teams as they developed a new type of strategic plan that emphasized culture, values, and workforce engagement to achieve institutional goals. This included creating infographics and other tools that made complex planning easy to communicate and understand.
- We provided individual and team coaching to create, implement, communicate, and navigate the change that comes with a new strategic plan to withstand extreme uncertainty and disruption.
The impact:
- Leadership teams across the institution are more collaborative than before.
- Uncertainty is met with tools rather than trepidation as organizational values, scenario planning, and rapid road-mapping have become core competencies within the leadership team.
- There is new capacity to respond to day-to-day crises, while also laying and reinforcing the foundation for significant long-term shifts in the role post-secondary education plays in the Future of Work. These now exist in tandem.
The next steps:
Challenge Factory remains a ‘behind the scenes’ advisor, source of tools, and support to senior leaders, frontline managers, and strategic working groups. We evolve how we work with this institution as their own capacity and needs change, making sure that the deep institutional knowledge that we’ve developed with them can remain accessible.
Learn more:
- Workforce Architecture article: “Asking better questions: A Culture Blueprint that works”
- Blog: “The most important question for returning to the office is not who, how, or when. Here’s why.”
- Blog: “The pandemic crisis management equation”
- Infographic and career development sector case study: “Write a letter to yourself—from the future”