Future-readiness

On March 10, we were invited to present our Boardroom Creativity book to the Dighosen Exploring Board community. We used it as an occasion to pilot our new future-readiness framework since so many great directors from all over the world are part of this network. We knew we could trust them to provide us with useful feedback!

We argued that to be future-ready, you should:

• Create Regularly take time to design the future of your business, asking the ‘what if’ questions: what if your company didn’t exist anymore? What if your market would be disrupted?
• Lead Define what the ideal board for your company looks like. How much time on your agenda should you spend on ‘exploiting’ what is, and how much time ‘exploring’ the future? What mix of people do you need?
• Care Build the foundation by identifying a purpose that enables innovation and motivates your people.
• Learn Embrace your creative intelligence and develop your creative metaskills. Creativity is a muscle that can be trained, only 33% is in your DNA.

From the discussion we learned that although boards spend time developing strategy each year, the way they do this could be more innovative and challenge the status quo. Also, people felt that their purpose could be better at enabling innovation, either because their current purpose wasn’t strong enough or because it wasn’t used for innovation (yet). See the blog on the Digoshen site.

This Dighosen meet-up showed us that our future-readiness framework inspires the right kind of discussion, and how we can enhance it even further by adding deep dives in each quadrant. Thank you Digoshen community!

How can you improve the future-readiness of your company? Does your purpose enable innovation?