Education Foresight
This foresight project for Steelcase Education explored how the landscape of K-12 and higher education might evolve in the future and how the business might evolve to serve that future.
Problem
What will Education look like in the future?
To stay ahead of the competition and the market, the Steelcase Education business engaged with WorkSpace Futures to develop a future-forward strategy using Foresight methodology, as developed by the Institute for the Future and adapted for Steelcase by WorkSpace Futures. The goals were to conceive of potential disruptors and opportunities that the ever-shifting education vertical might produce and how we might play in those futures.
Approach
Foresight tools
+ signal collection
+ forecast development
+ consequence mapping
Workshops
+ workshop development
+ facilitation
This project led to a workshop in which business stakeholders participated in consequence mapping, a tool to envision how different parts of an ecosystem, such as students or parents or teachers, might react to a cataclysmic event. In a subsequent workshop, we presented our findings and opportunity areas that emerged from signals. Signals are stories or incidents that point to a radically different future, such as Chinese schools using facial tracking to detect if students are sleeping.
The stakeholders then assessed these opportunity areas on how big they might be for the business, whether the business possessed the capabilities to compete in the opportunity area, and when they thought this future opportunity might become a reality.
With a shorter list of opportunities, we then facilitated an ideation workshop where the group split into smaller teams to create products or services to serve customers in our new envisioned futures.
Outcomes
The stakeholders used this work as a basis for their future strategy. Each left with a better understanding of the potential threats and opportunities that the future might hold for them and concrete concepts to develop in order to prepare for that future.
Learnings
I was happy to apply what I learned at the Institute for the Future about how to collect signals of the future and developed them into themes from which we can start to make some strategic decisions.
I learned that with future work it helps to have an informed point of view about where the future is heading but still allow for moments of co-creation with stakeholders.