Using Foresight & Future Studies in Investment Strategy

Uh hi everybody. Um yeah, my name is Nicolas. Uh I've been in the practice of strategic foresight for the past uh yeah 17 years or so. Uh in different forms advising some of the world's biggest brands and how we can look at change and try to understand what is changing technology, our society, our values in order to you know have a grasp on how the future might look like. Um how many of you are actually familiar with strategic foresight or practice some foresight practices uh in your uh daily life?

You can just raise your hand. Yeah, a few. Cool. Um so maybe it's a good idea to actually start with the the premise of what is strategic foresight as a discipline and I can talk a lot about that but in a in a nutshell we are referring to the discipline of making sense of emerging change um exploring its future implications and use that new awareness to take better decisions today to uh so it's not about predicting the future it's actually more about understanding change what is growing, what is declining, what is transforming, what is uh being born, what's dying. Right?

So it's not too much about having a crystal crystal ball uh and try to make predictions about what the future will look like, but more about understanding change. And we have a lot of examples of companies that failed to understand change or underestimated change. uh Kodak invented the digital camera, but they they put it on a shelf because they didn't believe that, you know, people wanted to take digital pictures or they just wanted to protect their their film business. Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix at some point, but they didn't understand the change on how people will consume content and the streaming revolution. Same with Nokia was at some point the biggest uh communications company in the world and they they failed to understand the smartphone revolution or Yahoo as well who had a chance to buy Google for very little money at some point but they also didn't understand how search uh was also changing and how behavior on the internet was changing.

So there's a lot of examples on how um certain technologies are misunderstood or certain new behaviors are not being really uh understood either. And this is especially relevant today um where we are not just living in a multirrisis world with multiple crisises happening at the same time you know political, economical, financial um environmental. We are actually living more on a permanent state of crisis. So we need to actually find ways of dealing with that of on dealing with the fact that crisises are not going anywhere. If anything, they're going to get stronger and more complex, more interconnected because of the nature of our world today.

Uncertainty is not the exception. We used to think that uncertainty was just uh you know a glitch in the matrix, but actually is the operating system where everything today is based our societies, our work, our financial system. And yet we are expected to you know lead organizations, lead teams and find exciting opportunities in this context that is constantly changing right. So that tension is really interesting. How do we find interesting um opportunities especially within with the um uh strategy and investment perspective in a context that is constantly moving.

We know that mo almost half of adults uh say that they feel more uncertain about the future than just two years ago. Uh and many of them are already changing their behavior because of it. Right? So we do it in our private lives but then also this reflects in our organizations. We are changing our behavior when it comes to uncertainty and this is not a new idea.

uh Peter Drocker already in the 60s was talking about the idea that we need to learn to feel comfortable in uncertainty to navigate uncertainty. But we believe that it's not that navigating uncertainty is not enough. We also need to actually learn to thrive in that uncertainty and use that uncertainty in our advantage. So this is uh why strategic foresight or this practice of thinking about the future actively systemically uh and deeply is extremely important if we want to remain relevant and resilient in in this context. So I just wanted to share with you very briefly three of uh our key principles uh and you know uh also when we work with certain organizations and how we can navigate this uncertain times and of course with a small angle a small perspective on investment strategy and the first principle is that foresight this idea about thinking about the future must be collaborative.

the future is too complex to to just to do it alone. Um 12 13 14 years ago I was hired to provide a lot of insights and reports to uh different companies to different organizations. Um but I don't believe that that has too much value anymore because there's so much information going on around that you know we also need to you know me as an expert I can tell you a lot of things but you and your people have a lot of the answers. uh from within. Paul Verelio talked about this idea of dramology.

This idea that um we need to understand the speed of change because of technology sometimes changes faster than our legislation than our laws even than our values. So we we have a really hard time adapting to certain changes and I think we can experience that and feel that in the conversations today when it comes to AI. Sometimes the development is so fast that we we don't know okay how do I feel about this? Do do we want to replace uh all our lawyers by with machines? Have we had that conversation?

Um do I don't want to have any employees at all? Do I only want to have AI agents? it that becomes almost a philosophical discussion right um so we need to understand what is the the speed and the impact of that change especially today when we talk about AI you know actually how how big is that impact that potential impact and and when is it happening is it in a 10-year horizon is it right now that it's happening you know change also can mean many many different things so we also need to understand you know uh that change and And how do we capture that? Um we looked at something um that is emerging. We we look at the things that can you know small things emerging in behaviors in values that can tell us something about what will be meaningful in the future.

That's what we call signals of change right small you know bits of you know people doing things differently believing things differently. If you think of uh 2008, I remember I I was reading some articles of people that was traveling to the Caribbean and working remotely from their laptops and that was you know very few people that was able to do that but that was a signal of change at that time of how work could potentially change right and right now that is just another dimension of work. It didn't replace how we work uh 100%. But it added a new dimension, right? So, we're looking at those things today.

What are those emerging um behaviors, new societal values that are changing? Of course, new technologies, new business models, consumer shifts, new regulations and policies. And that's why Forsan must be collaborative. um first collaborating with technology especially today for the tools that we have. This field has been revolutionized on the last 3 years I would say where we used to have a huge team of researchers that doing a lot of um investigations and looking for some of these trends and some of these emerging signals and now a lot of that process has been you know automated um and it's good enough you know it's good enough to get to very valuable insights we still need the expertise um certain expertise in certain areas but certain tools today can give us a lot of volume a lot of breath and also expose us to things that maybe we didn't know before.

But as important as that, the collaboration with other humans is becoming even more important today, you know, because that's the only way that we can ensure relevance, that we can ensure alignment and also that we keep people engaged and motivated uh in the work. Just to give you a small example, we've been working for many years with Polar Orbit, which is a um big beauty brand from Japan, cosmetic kind of traditional hardcore cosmetics. And they've been very very good at constantly asking themselves the question of what will be the future categories that will define the landscape of beauty in the coming years, right? So beyond creams, beyond uh facial treatments and things like that, what is what is that will define what is beautiful? what do we consider as beautiful?

How technology is changing our perceptions of what is beautiful etc. And of course can they play a role there? Can they invest resources and energy in these new categories that are emerging? So with them we've been doing a lot of um conscious use of their intell internal collective intelligence. They have hundreds of very very smart people, a lot of PhD students on anything from chemistry to biology to arts and culture and we just ask them what are you observing?

What are the signals that you are observing in your organization that we should know of? You know, and some come with some new uh technology that emerged or some new research paper that was, you know, uh developed. Some come with something they observe their grandma doing or their kids doing. Um and slowly we start creating a picture of all of these different changes of all of these signals. Um we have our own tools that we use to do that where you know we can create assisted by of course technology and AI kind of that can help us with you know hey here are 10 really interesting things that we should know about beauty or you know you can add it yourself if you are an expert on that field but the idea is to generate and visualize this common truth because when we do that we can actually have really interesting conversations because it doesn't become about finding you what's right or wrong but rather getting a big picture of you know what is changing in our landscape.

So technology give us volume and breath but human reflection is what actually gives us meaning in our organizations. The second principle um has to do with instead of doing predictions actually focusing on developing landscapes and understanding the complexity of you know how our present is evolving. This is important because the f the future is a constantly moving target. You know, our image of how the future might look like already changed in the last two weeks with the new conflicts. There's a new conflict coming up.

There's a new technology developing every day almost. So, our idea of the future is constantly moving. It's constantly changing. And the traditional approach to doing this has been yeah doing a lot of reports, trend reports. Hey, these are the 10 trends you should follow next year.

this is what will define this certain uh field this certain industry and that's really good. It's really important to do that but also it's becoming a little bit obsolete very quickly. It's a little bit static uh and doesn't really give us the nuances that sometimes um reality actually has. So, it's a little bit like looking into, you know, the weather and saying, "Okay, it's going to be sunny or it's going to be cloudy today." Versus looking at the the radar version of the weather app, right? When you I can see, oh, there's a cloud here, so maybe I'm I'm I only have one hour to take a run before you actually start pouring.

Uh, and this becomes quite valuable because it shapes my behavior. The other one is still important because it gives me awareness. But this kind of live view on things shapes my behavior and how I take decisions. So we want to move from you know being just reactive organizations into being more anticipatory right. So actually we are proactive in that change and using that change to our advantage.

with this uh Japanese company that I was talking about before, we we've done a lot of just mapping of like what is the landscape of beauty happening, right? We've done a lot of projects around how certain emerging cultures are defining, you know, the beauty industry from areas that have nothing to do with the beauty industry. Uh for instance, uh we did a lot of research around microbiome seven, eight years ago. um they were very curious about, you know, how that culture of people doing kombucha at home and all of these fermented foods at home actually is because they want to improve their health. Um and that's also changing certain perceptions of of beauty, right?

So they ask themselves maybe that's a place that we can play a role in. Should we go into foods? Should we go into um beverages for instance? And we tried to translate a lot of those maps also into something we call like uh strategic compasses which is very simple visualizations of um what are the areas what are our key bits um because you know you can see hundreds and hundreds of these interesting signals of change and interesting things interesting trends but of course there's a lot of volume in that so we need to simplify that and this is an example of one of the compasses that we did um with them which was visual izing their you know three main pillars of investment. So they wanted to focus on uh you know identity uh connecting and the digital technologies and things like that.

And within that there are a lot of interesting themes. So interesting areas that they they were keeping an eye on with different urgencies. Some of them were urgent now some of them were more important maybe in five to 10 years. And the value of this thing we this one we did before the pandemic um is that after a big event like the pandemic or like a financial crisis you can review this and you can say okay how does it look like now some something that we thought maybe was relevant in 10 years actually became really relevant now and we're not trying to make a prediction but we're just trying to be aware to cultivate that awareness and right now in our own tools we're actually playing with the idea of actually creating a landscape So uh this you could see are different themes that are organized based on relevance you know what's more hype now or what's more relevant for our organization. So actually gives us a sense of what are these things emerging in our landscape that we should identify potential threats potential uncertainties potential risks but also potential opportunities maybe a places where we haven't played a role before places that we haven't discovered that we should potentially um look into and the last principle that I wanted to share with you is the idea of using futures thinking and for that more than as a process that you do once in a year for a strategy development, more as a leadership skill, as a leadership mindset.

Um because at the end of the day, foresight only matters when it helps you shape decisions. Otherwise, it's a really nice exercise. Everybody likes to think about the future and imagine flying cars and things like that. But if it doesn't shape your decision- making processes, it's not it's not that useful. And we like to say that it's not an information problem especially today because we have so much access to that.

It's more of a leadership problem. It's more about how do we translate when we identify a problem a potential opportunity space into an action into an actual action and we like to work with this model sometimes um uh that actually illustrate how complex is to lead today. Uh so first you need to understand how are you leading yourself in this context. How are you feeling yourself as a leader comfortable uh in a world that is constantly changing. Then you need to understand how how do you lead others?

How do you relate to other people? Then how are you leading technology? So technology is actually becoming also something that we need to lead that we need to understand how we're going to use. how we're going to lead ideas that's the more the creative the creative dimension and it's also the systemic dimension that's more how do we lead change you know what's the value that we want to create as an organization or in the world or in our society right so leading today is is extremely complex because all of these levels actually have different kinds of strategies and kind of different mindsets that we need to to use and the other aspect is that something that I've seen a lot is that we can do a lot of the studies and uh and research is that at the end of the day in the boardroom a lot of decisions are made based on intuition is gut feeling is the people that has had uncertain experience and that's a good thing I mean like intuition is just accumulated experience so the more you know the more exposed you are to new ideas to new things the bigger your intuition is right and the more sensitive people the good people with good intuition is really sensitive to to some of these things right so foresight doesn't really need to replace intuition. It should fit it.

Right? So being exposed to these new ideas once a year, every 6 months or you know every quarter actually fits your intuition and hopefully it will help you to develop that you know your gut feeling. Um and also hopefully will help you um enable better dialogue you know in your organizations. you know, a lot of good strategy actually happens when there's good dialogue, when there's good conversations. Um, and then when we, you know, have a common truth and a common ground to have those conversations, we can actually enable really meaningful dialogue instead of trying to figure out what's true or what's not.

Um and just to close with the example of of that Japanese company that I was sharing with you, you know, this is a lot of the different layers of knowledge that we had, a lot of insights, a lot of signals, a lot of interesting um opportunity spaces for for investment, but we tried to really take that away from the reports and activate it. So facilitating a lot of conversations, spaces for people to discuss all their leadership groups. They could you know dig deeper into these insights and actually have a space where they could talk and align uh and explore okay where actually where can where can we go here. Um so they have you know they for for example they have decided to you know go into hospitality right now because they see that that's also a way of fulfilling their vision of helping people experience uh yeah better beauty experiences. Um they also decided to go into more biohacking because that's something that you know beauty brands usually haven't really touched upon uh or even aesthetics right.

So they are one of the biggest uh donors and art. Yeah. purchasing uh organizations in Japan now. They're buying a lot of art. They're creating supporting a lot of museums and has nothing to do with you know cosmetics but is living up their vision right and they're doing different kinds of investments and efforts in in these three different pillars based on some of these conversations that are of course are constantly changing.

So just to close um the opposite of uncertainty is not necessarily certainty it's actually possibility right. So in uncertain times is actually the best time to find um the best potential opportunities and processes like this can be really really helpful to you know use uncertainty as as an asset. Thank you so much and I'm happy to uh take some questions afterwards or if you are yeah if you want to have a chat or you have any questions around this and this methodology. So thank you very much for for listening.