Keynote & Workshop Topics:
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Strategic Planning
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Surviving the Crash for Fun and Profit: A Futurist’s Guide to the Hard Times Ahead
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'If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs - you ducked at the right time.' - Groucho Marx
We are in a period of financial and economic crisis for which managers have no experience. Navigating through the tough times ahead will take foresight, and careful thought and planning, not just the routine belt-tightening that comes with a typical recession. Richard Worzel, Canada's leading futurist, offers a presentation that will help organizations survive the crunch times, and pick up market share, by exploring:
• What's ahead? - There are some similarities to world events that are almost 80 years old, but they can't be applied simplistically because today's world is very different from the world of 1930. Which precedents are valuable, and which misleading?
• Where are the risks? - There are pitfalls ahead, financial, economic, and geopolitical. Where are they, and how should you prepare if they occur? What signs do you watch for, and what contingency plans will be most valuable?
• Where's the money? - There is still a lot of money around, but it's gone into hiding. Where should you look for it, and how do you attract it to your offerings?
• What tools do you need? - Exercising foresight is a skill that improves with practice, and through the use of the proper tools. Richard can provide a toolbox of techniques that makes foresight more valuable, and easier to practice.
Turbulent times are times when market share is up for grabs. This is not only a period of unprecedented challenge, but one of unparalleled opportunity. Learn how to grab it while it's here!
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Innovate or Evaporate! How to Invent Your Way Out of Tomorrow’s Tough Times
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The world has changed from two years ago - or even six months ago. We are experiencing events and circumstances for which we have no precedents and no guides, and this means that the old, tried and true methods for keeping sales up and operations safe are no longer as effective. Instead, think about ways to re-invent your organization to take advantage of today's novel situation. This presentation by Richard Worzel, a strategic planner, and Canada's leading futurist, outlines how to do this by:
• Assessing the differences from what we had before compared with the way things are now. What's different, and what do you need to do about it?
• Identify the stumbling blocks that make it hard for your organization to change and innovate. Innovation is neither easy nor comfortable, but in today's environment, it's the difference between survival and disaster.
• Use proven techniques to come up with novel ways of doing business, and test them out for their effectiveness.
• Overcome the inertia of past successes with new possibilities, and assessing their potential before committing to a course of action.
Richard will help you put your organization on the road to change geared to today's problems, and help you bring your group safely into the next decade.
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Tools to Tame the Future (Workshop)
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No matter how carefully an organization prepares for the future, surprises are inevitable (remember 9/11, SARS, the dot.com boom and subsequent bust?). Success lies not in being right all the time, but in recovering faster, and responding more constructively to surprise when it happens. In this workshop, Richard Worzel, one of North America's leading futurists and strategic planners, introduces specific tools to allow you to anticipate the unexpected, to identify possible contingencies and prepare plans to deal with them, and to specify particular objectives, and then create the plans that will you deliver your organization to those objectives. This is a hands-on, real-world workshop that will give you immediate take-aways that you can use immediately, and that will have substantial impact on what your organization can - and does - achieve.
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The Next 20 Years of Your Life
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How is technology changing politics? Where will the jobs be, and who will get them? Will workers be put out of work by cheaper labour in China and India? What comes after the Internet and the handheld computer? How much privacy will we have? How much of their income will today's young workers pay in taxes to support their parents' generation when they retire? What will our role be in a global community? How will cars change from today? What fuel will they use? How fast will they go?
Twenty years from now the world will be a very different place, and today's professionals will face challenges and opportunities earlier generations never imagined. Futurist and strategic planner Richard Worzel explores those aspects of technology, the global economy, society, and demographics that are driving these changes, and traces how today's professionals can prepare to take advantage of the possibilities of the future.
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How to Avoid Predicting the Future (While Still Preparing for It!) (Workshop)
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Most organizations that embark on a strategic planning process wind up with a sense of unease. In order to plan for the future, they must predict what will happen, even though they know there is a strong possibility that their predictions will be wrong. If that happens, they also recognize their carefully laid plans may be less useful than they had hoped. To overcome this uncertainty, major organizations like Royal Dutch Shell, DaimlerChrysler, the U.S. military, and others engage in a more constructive process that is less dependent on luck and guesswork. Instead of making implicit assumptions about the future and then crossing their fingers and hoping they are right, planners make a range of detailed and explicit assumptions about what might happen, and then prepare contingency plans to deal with these eventualities. This process is called scenario planning, and leads to an entirely new mindset about future possibilities, more detailed and robust plans, and greater certainty about preparing for an uncertain future.
Richard Worzel, futurist, strategic planner, and best-selling author has helped organizations of all sizes, from small, elite research groups to multinational corporations, learn the techniques and processes of scenario planning, and apply it to their strategic planning. He custom designs workshops on this and related topics for each organization to suit their needs and the time available. As Richard tells planners: 'It's not a question of whether the future will catch you by surprise - it certainly will. Instead, it's a question of how quickly you recover from such surprises, and how well you respond to them.' This strategic planning workshop provides a structured way of capturing uncertainty, and harnessing it to your organization's advantage while providing an immediately practical framework that you can use over and over again.
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