Designing deliberate financial services futures with foresight: Embracing change and uncertainty in increasingly disruptive digital ecosystems

Amid accelerating environmental complexity and uncertainty, businesses across nearly all sectors of the economy have to deal with growing economic, technological, and societal uncertainties that could impact sustainable growth and broader social benefits. Consequently, an organization’s vision and strategic direction need to take into account a rapidly evolving external environment. Against these trends, the integration of Foresight and Design processes may deliver significant opportunities for anticipating (thinking of) alternative scenarios and envisioning (acting on) creative responses that deal with the complexity and uncertainty inherent in increasingly disruptive digital ecosystems.

Integrating design and foresight practices into the strategy development process can produce both incremental improvement in the performance of today’s business model and open up opportunities to completely transform it as well. That is, foresight feeding into design processes could benefit financial services decision-makers from gaining a shared understanding of change, scenarios, and implications, thus improving an organization’s strategic innovation capabilities. Based on identifying different possibilities, decision-makers are better informed to select and integrate the most preferable and desirable futures.

Demonstrating the process of integrating design with foresight as a shared, understandable, and transmittable area of knowledge, very short stories of applied futures research in the Financial Services sector are presented to inspire and stimulate the Global Business Innovation Conversation – FinTech, through relevant examples of enriching organizational strategic decision-making with creativity, visualization and prototyping capabilities.