How Serious Insights Innovation Workshops Can Help Your Organization Drive Innovation

Our scenario-based approach to innovation takes a product, investment, or issue and runs it through the process we call wind tunneling. Through wind tunneling, the group explores the underlying assumptions associated with their project and how it might need to change under different social, technological, economic, environmental and political circumstances. These workshops give attendees permission to think beyond the constraints of conventional planning, which often results in innovative ideas as they see opportunities and obstacles from new perspectives.

• Challenge Assumptions
  Challenging assumptions underlie our scenario-based innovation approach. We provide multiple scenarios with diverse but very plausible assumptions about the future. Workshop attendees explore how their product, message, concept or plan would fare under different assumptions about the future.
• Expand the Strategic Canvas
  Scenarios offer attendees a strategic canvas beyond the simple extrapolation associated with thinking that tomorrow is similar to today except... Each future offers a rich array of alternative possibilities that inspire and challenge those who encounter them.
• Unleash New Ideas
  Scenarios give individuals permission to explore ideas often constrained by existing planning processes. By offering different views of the future, attendees will likely discover new ideas that they were not allowed to imagine or voice in a traditional planning process.
• Develop Contingencies
  In scenario planning, all of the futures happen and none of them happen. They are not intended as predictions but as exercises to challenge assumptions, broaden perspectives, and expose possibilities. Since we can’t know how the future will unfold, the scenario-based innovation workshop allows teams to put contingencies in place. If you aren’t given a chance to imagine something, you can’t plan for it. Scenario-based innovation workshops help teams put a name on uncertainty and a framework for managing through a future that may not be the one they want but ends up being the one they are given. Equally, these workshops allow them to prepare for success should a new technology, social movement, or political reality unleash an opportunity they previously felt was too good to imagine.