A businessmen needs to think like a futurist for him to be able to identify opportunities and gaps within the market space that he can take advantage of. Thanks to futuristic ideas, today you do not have to grow your business organically. If you are looking to venture into entrepreneurship and you have the skills and zeal, you can choose to buy a business which has already been established. You can then use banner stands and a host of digital marketing techniques including the use of mobile phones to tell your prospects that the ownership of the business has changed, and inform them on how you will endeavour to save them better than ever before.
If you want your business to grow, you need to master the art of being futuristic for you to be able to define market trends and use them to shape your business for growth. How can you, therefore, think like a futurist if you are a business leader? Here is how:
1. Stay updated on trends
Thinking like a futurist entails having an interest in trends. As a business leader the trends you should be watching out for include demographic, socio-cultural, economic and technological trends to mention a few. Why these? Well, you need to note that these are the macro-environmental factors that affect a business entity.
If you are a mobile phone manufacturing company for instance, you need to be up to date with emerging technologies. With that, you can get ideas that you can incorporate into your process for a competitive advantage. A business leader that stays up to date with the changing trends has more incentive to innovate, adapt and re-engineer processes in the organisation in order to have the edge.
2. Visualise
The next step towards thinking like a futurist is visualising. What are the possibilities and opportunities that come with emerging trends? Power your imagination and have an imagination of what things would look like. Think about how the trends might affect the future of your business and work backwards to establish how you arrived at that imagination.
3. Assess the scenarios
You have kept an eye on the emerging trends in technology and given it a deep thought. After exploring your creativity, you come up with a picture of what the emerging trends would do to your business and how much they can change things. By putting more thought to it, you even create a scenario at how you arrive at the picture. So far, you are doing great as a futurist. The next thing you should do is evaluate the scenario to establish whether or not it is practical.
As a futurist business leader, you should have a clear put strategy on how you will test the scenario. The plan should be able to identify the opportunity, purpose, value and the outcome of the scenario.
4. Have a growth mindset
If you want to think like a futurist, you need to do away with the fixed mindset. Futurists are growth and change oriented. If you are a business leader looking to think like a futurist, you need to accommodate the growth mindset too. Since the future is characterised by a lot of uncertainty, only a growth mindset can be able to take advantage of that element.
5. Learn from mistakes and failure
A futurist does not stop at the first failed attempt. The growth mindset reminds them that mistakes are opportunities for learning. Futurists know very well that failure if taken positively, can be an incentive for innovation.
While the future can sometimes be hard to predict or even control, having a futurist mindset in business is what will set you apart from the crowd.