Horizons
How do you handle the uncertainties affecting your business? Do you ignore or embrace them?
How prepared are you for what the future may throw your way?
Ipsos MORI’s Horizons is a small but growing network of our researchers who have set out to improve our clients’ responses to these challenges. Since 2005 we have run a number of futures and innovation projects across a range of sectors and subjects.
Applying collaborative foresight techniques, allied to practical interventions, we help organisations and individuals adapt to changing conditions. We use methods that reflect our interests in decision-making, social psychology, social computing, creativity and organisational culture. These include horizon scanning, weak signal detection, scenario immersion, visioning and rapid innovation.
Squaring up to uncertainty
Studies of cognitive bias, risk management, and innovation highlight how important it is for organisations and leaders to keep their “heads up” as they strive to move forward. In practice this means continually seeking fresh stimulus, diverse expertise, and weak signals of change to refresh strategy.
But doing so under the immediate pressures of life in business or public administration is no easy task. Time is short. Signals from the external environment seem too complex, too noisy and too diffuse to comprehend. Even if the appetite is there, organisations unconsciously evolve structures and cultures that prevent them seeing what’s right under their nose.
There are numerous techniques, resources, software tools - and of course consultants - offering remedies to all this. Most are helpful in some way. But quite often they, or their users fall into traps that limit their effectiveness.
The litany of failure – paraphrased below - is familiar to us from taking soundings and hearing stories from disillusioned corporate leaders and public administrators:
“futures techniques too often become the ends rather than the means”
“the frontline is ignored in favour of the management”
“outputs can oversimplify and either fail to disrupt orthodoxies, or create new ones”
“intellectually great fun but with little practical value”
“intelligence-gathering is outsourced or centralised rather than nurtured internally and distributed.”
None of these are cardinal sins. We have committed some ourselves, and made sure we learned the lessons pronto. But they are failures to realise the potential of futures work, which is to foster confident, collaborative and adaptive responses to uncertainty - to embrace, rather than avoid the unknown.
Ipsos MORI Horizons: a practical response to uncertainty
In tackling these challenges our approach is a pragmatic and agnostic one. We are not wedded to any particular package, tool or technique. In fact we like inventing new ones for you, by recombining what we know with what you want.
We take the trouble to learn about you and do whatever it takes for your organisation, to start delivering immediate benefit. Because despite the future being the object of inquiry, when it comes to practicalities there is – as the saying goes – no time like the present.
Being guided by what you want rather than purely what we can provide means we like working in partnership with organisations we know will deliver a great service that we can’t provide directly. In the past we’ve partnered successfully, and over several years, with universities, think tanks, consultancies, software developers and journalists, and are always open to more.
Notwithstanding our flexibility, we can broadly classify our work, and the methods we use into three related activities, which together create a virtuous cycle:
- Sensing: human and software-enabled capture and signification of diverse signals.
- Sense-making: mapping and prioritising signals, and identifying opportunities for action.
- Adapting: devising and piloting interventions to improve tactical advantage and/or long term strategic “fitness”.
In putting all this into action, we design and judge our work against three criteria – “the three C’s”, at least two of which must be met if the project is to be deemed a success (by us anyway!). We may not hit them all but we certainly try.
- Culture: our work must act as a major catalyst for change and evolution in clients’ organisational culture
- Capability: we leave every client with radically enhanced capability to undertake their own horizons work
- Change: beyond the above, each project must deliver some tangible benefit to business, policy or society in the short term, or at least fail nobly in the attempt. This could come in the form of an prototype, initiative or pilot.
Practising what we preach
Incidentally, Horizons is as much an internal specialism as an outward-facing one. We are currently devoting much of our time to developing Ipsos’ worldwide strategic capability using a combination of software tools, foresight techniques and culture change programmes. We are in the process of trying to create a “global brain” for the business that harnesses our collective intelligence and talent.
Case studies
- LGA/HSC Future of Local Public Services
- Sigma Scan
Some other recent examples of our work
- Futures and innovation projects for T-Mobile, Orange and Shell International
- An exploration of the future of policing for the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA)
- Scenario planning and large scale public simulation exercise for a hypothetical influenza pandemic DH/COI (2008)
- The future of water supplies in the Thames Gateway region to 2016, and the role of public behaviour.
- The future of leadership in the Senior Civil Service
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