Keynote & Workshop Topics:
|
Strategic Planning
|
Tools to Tame the Future (Workshop)
|
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.
|
|
The Next 20 Years of Your Life
|
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.
|
|
How to Avoid Predicting the Future (While Still Preparing for It!) (Workshop)
|
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.
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
