Futures prompter is a simple, low cost social media based engagement process for an organisations wanting to have its staff explore and contribute their ideas about the future of the organisation.
Futures prompter was developed in response to a local council’s desire to involve a broad range of staff in a discussion about which new ideas and technologies to invest in over the next few years. There was a requirement to challenge participants and also leave space for them to contribute their own examples and ideas. Like many organisations councils funds are tight and this had to be a low cost endeavour.
We developed process which can be run on internal social media discussion channels like Yammer. After a brief introduction participants were able to view and comment on different ideas and examples of what the future might hold and how that might be relevant to their organisation. This was presented as a safe space to add ideas and examples. The discussions moved through a sequence of typical future ‘voices’ in organisations (e.g, technological change) so that the was space for different types of views to be heard. At the end of the 3 week discussion participants were invited to rate which were the most important ideas which the council should invest in over the next few years.
It makes sense to use the collective intelligence of your organisation to frame a view of how scarce resources should be spent and to do this you need to engage a large number of people and challenge the dominant in-house thinking. The Futures prompter is a low cost product which can be run in-house by your team to do just that.
If you want to make sure that you’re covering your blind spots before making investment decisions, use futures prompter to engage your most precious resource; your staff, contact us at Action Foresight.