Planning for the future through the adoption of speculative design methods

How we applied speculative design methods to facilitate an intergenerational collaborative workshop for an agroindustrial family business.

Organization: Bellacruz del Llano

Location:
Colombia

Date:
2022

Role:
Consultant

One business, diverse visions for the future.

01.

As one of the emerging Colombian agroindustrial organizations, Bellacruz del Llano management team, advisors and family leaders came together to define a new strategic vision for the future.

The sector was facing the disruption of the global value chain, economic recessions across the globe, the emergence of a new political regime in Colombia, technological disruptions and the growing demand for climate-safe and socially responsible practices. To open space for divergent strategic scenarios, we designed a 2-day speculative futures workshop.

Mapping challenges and opportunities

02.

We began the day by reviewing together strategic analyses made by internal and external experts on the Economic, Political, Environmental and Technological landscapes of the agroindustrial local and global sector. Participants were encouraged to actively take notes and write down what they deemed the biggest challenges and opportunities that should be addressed during the workshop.

03. Defining priorities

19 different strategic themes were identified through the initial challenge mapping.

We ran 4 different group discussions followed by dot-voting sessions to collectively define the 3 main priorities that were going to be addressed during the rest of the workshop.

04. Envisioning scenarios for the future

Based on the insights gathered through research, discussions and expert talks, we built 3 different "polar matrixes" (one for each priority defined), opening 4 different potential scenarios for each of them.

Teams were encouraged to analyze and work through the different scenarios, mapping potential implications (through a Future’s Wheel), opportunities and concerns, and then framing a vision for the future from which they could work backwards (Backcasting) to establish a clear actionable roadmap for the next 10 years.

Each group pitched their work and we ran a rapid feedback session to synthesize the results and define the steps to move the project forward.