Contents of the Current Issue

Futuring in Action
By Peter F. Eder

Two eye-opening incidents from my experience as a futurist in corporate settings demonstrate the value of the strategic-foresight methodology described in Andy Hines's article.

1. Mapping the System. In the early 1980s, I was responsible for overseeing the marketing services activities of the GTE Corporation's 43 North American and Western European businesses. I was assigned to prepare a format for long-term forecasts (five to 10 years) in a way that would allow the plans to be compared.

It took about a year before we had a universal format, which resulted in a binder typically close to a hundred pages in content. While the data, objectives, and plans were comparable, the volume itself was challenging.

In a field visit to one of our operating entities, Unistrut Building Systems, the CEO asked for a meeting. He took from his desktop folder a four-page summary that he had one of his engineers create. It was a series of bar charts, curves, graphs, and pictures that summarized the plan and laid out a crystal clear road map for the next 10 years.

In this instance, a picture was worth not just a thousand words, but also tens of thousands of numbers.

2. Choosing the Right Forecasting Tools. During 1999 and 2000, I was involved in an effort to research and forecast prospects for using interactive media for telephone directory (Yellow and White Pages) advertising. The goal was to help the phone companies' senior management and their publishing components to determine the needs and opportunities to integrate online publishing.

I helped to construct primarily a two-element research test. The first was a series of wide-ranging focus groups with consumers, businesses, publishers, and telecom executives. The second was a Delphi study using about 50 well-known experts in the fields of telecommunications and media.

While the end result was that the Delphi study built an intensive and insightful picture of the coming decade, senior management was enthralled and distracted by the focus groups. Despite continuous warnings of the hazards of drawing conclusions from focus groups alone, the organization used participants' comments to affirm the pre-opinions held by management. Time and again, managers viewed the focus-group commentary as gospel.

Many of the Delphi study findings, which took longer to complete than the "get it quick" focus group inputs, challenged or reinterpreted the focus-group findings. In the end, the collective wisdom of the Delphi study members laid out a much more credible and reasoned road-map, but it took considerable time to get senior management's attention.

A lesson learned here was to keep the executive suite out of focus-group viewing rooms.

Peter F. Eder is THE FUTURIST's contributing editor for Marketing and Communications. He is an experienced marketing services executive at major U.S. corporations and now leads Peter F. Eder & Associates, a marketing consulting practice. His address is 7 Red Barn Road, Darien Connecticut 06820. E-mail peterfeder@earthlink.net.

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