The Future of Events
Applying a foresight lens to uncover
potential in an evolving market
Forecasting methods improve agile team outcomes
Summary
While working with the Virtual Events Team, another design lead and I created a format and structure for leading teams through a “foresight” process - to apply a series of methods to a theme or challenge and predict what factors might influence that space over a period of time, ultimately arriving at an informed hypothesis and set of proposals and scenarios.
The context for this work was a push toward Innovation and an investment in enterprise incubation, acceleration, fluency in methods, and metrics.
The future of virtual events and technology was a topic of much speculation, particularly as return-to-office plans and hybrid work arrangements emerged. We worked with the team to apply and hone the Foresight approach, and give the team greater clarity to forecast their roadmap. Ultimately, the frameworks and methods used were scaled and grew into a formalized Innovation Accelerator practice at McKinsey.
INNOVATION RESEARCH STRATEGY
INITIATIVE
Scope & role:
Two design leads from different parts of our organization both have an interest in future studies. Create a comprehensive and adaptable framework for teams to utilize.
We identified a few interested teams to facilitate the process with and hosted product teams and client services teams for innovation sprints.
Virtual events was the first; a cross-functional product & service team with research, tech, support, PM, agile, and design participating. As an agile product team, work could not be paused for full days to be committed to Foresight, so instead we conducted a series of 2-hour workshops over 4 weeks
Key achievements:
Worked with senior leadership to seed a practice of innovation for teams and organizations with a cadence and metrics. The approach was adapted to serve a variety of teams, including client services.
As more teams participated, we achieved improved org fluency in foresight - becoming more adaptive and strategic and less reactive
Virtual Event published a foresight document that became a defining guide for expert consultants
Product team became a model for others and was able to integrate Foresight into their way of working, regularly revisiting and revising predictions as needed