Transformative strategies unveiled: Leveraging future-back thinking for business resilience
Future-back thinking starts with exercises to envision possible futures for your business and then using those scenarios to walk back and strategize about what your organization needs to do to prepare for those futures. It provides executives with a way to plan and prepare. In one of my earlier sessions with Johansen, he talked about the fact that in several of their future-back sessions they imagined the scenario of a global pandemic and for those firms that went through that exercise, they were more prepared when COVID-19 struck.
In terms of today's environment one of Johansen's key messages was about the current level of change and how, no matter what business you are in, the future is even less predictable now than ever. He also talked about moving from a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambitious) world where the future was 'uncertain but understandable' to today being in a BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible) world (term coined by Jamais Cascio). In this version of the world, the BANI future is fraught with tension, focused on the crisis of grievance and bleeding trust.
In the move from VUCA to BANI, the assumption per Johansen is that 'the future may not be understandable.' He presented a compelling picture of what this new future looks like and then provided some hope by encouraging everyone in the audience to use generative AI to help be more productive. Using AI to augment our current knowledge and provide new questions and answers is a way to keep up with the high rate of change.
For those of you interested in this work, I would strongly suggest reading his latest book, 'Leaders Make the Future,' and getting his new book that drops in September, "Navigating the Age of Chaos.'
As the presentation continued, we talked about other ways we can all learn and be ready for the future. One necessity discussed was collaborating with inter-generational teams. And as we talked about this, I looked at who was on the virtual session. We had UA students, faculty, and staff as well as senior business executives, leaders from local startups and alumni. Our audience was inter-generational.
During the first on-site and all-day event of the GAIL Forum on Feb. 4, 2025, we asked participants to sit together with people 'like them' and had codes for student, faculty/staff, and business executive on their name tags. Then after having time with people in similar roles, we asked them to mix up and sit at different tables. They could easily look at their name tags (color coded) to choose a table with variety in roles. I was not sure how this exercise would work, but at the end of the day, participants thanked me for having them move to other groups in a purposeful manner.
The overall lesson learned for me, when blending my learning from Johansen's talk and our own work in the GAIL Forum, is that leaning into the future, particularly as it is described by many as consisting of current and anticipated chaos, requires a solid group of different people, with 'different' being not just current job roles but also types of industries, social and cultural backgrounds, and more. Our job is and will be to prepare to learn together.
When talking about the BANI future, our expert futurist told us that the 'BANI future will reward clarity but punish certainty.' What better way to question what we think is certain than to lean on people in our network who bring new and different thinking to the topics of the day.
Our next session with the GAIL Forum will take place in September. If you want help navigating the uncertainty with a group of peers who are helpful and knowledgeable, make sure to reach out and learn more about how to get involved with the Forum. Write to me directly at aei@ua.edu and/or learn more at our website.
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