🌿🧭🌳 OD71: Trends ∙ Initiatives ∙ Ways of Thinking ∙ Automation
Trends Map 2021/22, Questions about New Initiatives, Reflecting on Ways of Thinking, Automation's Impact on Engagement
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#practice
Trends Map 2021/22
Trends are one of the useful inputs to the Strategy & Business Planning work that is being done these days to bring more clarity about what’s next for businesses, in 2022.
If you’re involved in such work or if you’re working in Innovation, you might find useful something that we’ve created to help our own clients: The 2021/22 Trends Map.
Our Trends Map shows almost 800 trends (macro-trends and micro-trends) across 10 areas (Tech, Business & Brands, Work, Retail, Finance, Health, Entertainment & Fun, Society, Planet and Other Sectors).
We’ve synthesized the map from an extensive research of 50+ most recent public reports about trends from sources like Accenture, BBC, Deloitte, Dentsu, eMarketer, Fast Company, Fjord, Forrester, Frog Design, Future Today Institute, Gartner, Glassdoor, GSMA, GWI, Kantar, KPMG, McKinsey, Ogilvy, Oliver Wyman, Pandora, PWC, TrendHunter, TrendWatching, We Are Social, World Economic Forum, WPP, Wunderman Thompson, Yelp.
The available formats of the map are:
High-resolution PDF for zooming in and exploring
(Optional) Editable Miro board for working with the map during an actual workshop - e.g. selecting, clustering, connecting trends in meaningful ways for the business you work with
#practice
Questions about New Initiatives
When building roadmaps with various initiatives or when you’re just starting something new, this list of 40 questions from John Cutler might come in handy.
Here are some questions that we particularly enjoyed (highlights ours):
Imagine you had to judge an internal competition to pick the best intervention to solve this problem. You’re responsible for writing judging criteria for your fellow judges. How would you rank submissions?
Describe the “good news” you hope to elicit as a result of this effort. How might you describe it in a company-wide presentation in a non-success-theater-like, non-fluffy way? Write the dream customer feedback tweet. How might the good news change in the short, mid, and long term as we realize the benefits?
Explain how this connects to the broader company strategy. Why is this a critical part/piece of the puzzle? Together with other initiatives, are we telling a cohesive story?
You’re about to occupy some % of the careers of a couple fellow human beings. Why should they come along for this adventure?
Challenge yourself to cut the scope here by 75%. Would that deliver some value? Should we pursue that first, even if it expands the overall scope a bit?
What are the known unknowns here?
What is the leap of faith here? What must I believe without supporting data?
#reflect
How often are you thinking about your ways of thinking?
#study
Automation's Impact on Engagement
Interesting new research done by Johnny Långstedt with the Åbo Akademi University brings a new perspective about the impact of automation in the workplace (highlights ours):
(…) when routine work tasks are being replaced with intelligent technologies, the result may be that employees no longer experience their work as meaningful.
Our values guide many of the selections we make during our lives, including career or occupational choices and the type of competences we value. That’s why it is important to understand how the changes brought to work by novel technologies affect future work and if work will correspond to what we today view as meaningful (…)
Up to date, we have mostly talked about how nice it is that routine work is being reduced. But what about those who enjoy such work? This is the first study aimed at understanding the ways our values are linked to the work we are expected to carry out in the future says Långstedt.
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