Richard is frequently asked what topics he speaks on. The answer is that it depends on what would be most useful for your group. The future is a broad, complex subject, and there's always a lot to discuss, so the key question truly is: what aspects of the future will be of most value to your conference or workshop, and the people involved? Having said that, we know it helps to have some idea of the kinds of topics Richard has spoken on in the past. Here are a few of his program outlines.
Innovation for Survival and Success
Innovation has become a corporate religion, in part because there is so much happening in so many areas that organizations must now innovate to survive. Yet our own natural biases often defeat innovation before it begins, resulting in organizations where people look good, but don't don't actually innovate. In this workshop, futurist and strategic planner Richard identifies the forces that oppose innovation, provides strategies to create an environment that encourages it, and then offers specific techniques that will allow you to arrive at new ideas, new directions, and practical new products and services. These techniques will allow you to focus on the future needs and wants of your clients and their clients, to broaden your thinking beyond the confines of your present thinking, and to develop the outlines of a game plan to bring your ideas into commercial reality. This workshop will provide you with take-aways you can use immediately in your business, as well as a tool kit of techniques that you can use over and over again. Innovation is a skill that can be learned &mdash and this workshop teaches it explicitly.
Using technology to get personal
Any salesperson worth her salt, and any marketer worthy of the name know that the more you know about a client or prospect, the more likely you are to be able to serve them well, and secure their business. That's a truism that is unlikely ever to change. But advances in technology are now making it possible to get much more personal with many more people, and sales and marketing professionals who want to hold onto their existing clients, and build their businesses into the future need to add new tools to supplement the old, or lose out to more technically-savvy competitors. The emergence of new means of tailoring communications, including blogging, podcasting, and RSS, will allow you to sink deeper roots into your client base and among potential prospects, adding value and building loyalty at a time when loyalty is largely on the wane. In this wide-ranging presentation of how technology is forcing change on the landscape of sales and marketing, futurist and strategic analyst Richard Worzel talks about how technology is re-formatting the society we live in, the way we relate to each other, the new tools emerging, and how on-the-ball marketing and sales organizations can use these tools to multiply their presence in the marketplace, and defend and expand their reach.
How to Avoid Predicting the Future (While Still Preparing for It!)
Most organizations that embark on a strategic planning process wind up with a sense of unease. In order to plan for the future, they must predict what will happen, even though they know there is a strong possibility that their predictions will be wrong. If that happens, they also recognize their carefully laid plans may be less useful than they had hoped. To overcome this uncertainty, major organizations like Royal Dutch Shell, DaimlerChrysler, the U.S. military, and others engage in a more constructive process that is less dependent on luck and guesswork. Instead of making implicit assumptions about the future and then crossing their fingers and hoping they are right, planners make a range of detailed and explicit assumptions about what might happen, and then prepare contingency plans to deal with these eventualities. This process is called scenario planning, and leads to an entirely new mindset about future possibilities, more detailed and robust plans, and greater certainty about preparing for an uncertain future.
Richard Worzel, Canada's leading futurist and author of the best-selling book, Who Owns Tomorrow?, has helped organizations of all sizes, from small research groups to multinational corporations, learn the techniques and processes of scenario planning, and apply it to their strategic planning. He custom designs workshops on this and related topics for each organization to suit their needs and the time available. As Richard tells planners: "It's not a question of whether the future will catch you by surprise &mdash it certainly will. Instead, it's a question of how quickly you recover from such surprises, and how well you respond to them." Scenario is a structured way of capturing uncertainty, and harnessing it to your organization's advantage.