4 – Synthesis and follow-up

Now that you have used Actionable Futures toolkit to build a future vision for your organisation, service or a product, it is time to take next steps towards to the optimal future by making the results of your work tangible and communicable.

Depending on your project and goals the potential next steps could be for example:

Resonance testing to understand how people react to the potential futures you’ve now created. Resonance testing is a method to validate product concepts against a set of experiential goals— your futures and the whys. The method originates from physical product design, but works with digital artefacts and ideas as well.

Backcasting to reverse engineer the pathways to your North stars. Backcasting is a reverse scenario-building method that starts with a the optimal future we just defined, and then builds and makes visible several different scenarios from the future vision to where we are now. You can build directly what we did in North stars already — just add lanes and details until what you have becomes a reverse customer journey from the future.

Related information:
Backcasting (Wikipedia)
How Nokia backcasted its way out of a dead end – and why your company should do the same
Backcasting (The Natural Step)

Strategy Filling the gaps in between north star futures and what do they mean to the business or an organisation you have now. How could we get where we want ot be viably?

Related information:
Playing to Win Strategy Toolkit

Visualising and prototyping the futures through speculative design and provocatypes is a powerful tool to dive deeper into what are the possible futures, and their counterparts?