Shape Your Choices
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Use your scenarios to inform decisions.
- Shape decisions using your values.
Use Scenarios to Spark New Insights
Look how far you’ve come. You can anticipate directions of change by spotting signals of change, driving forces, and critical uncertainties. You can imagine alternative scenarios that would be different from the baseline, and tell stories that both convey their meaning and emotionally motivate action. You’ve completed your exploration of the future.
Now you’re ready to bring it home with the final step in the Salesforce Futures approach: Shape your choices. You decided to use futures thinking because there was a question about the future that could guide the decision you face. If you’ve kept your exploration focused, the scenarios you built should each give you different potential answers to that question.
Sense Opportunities and Risks
The way a scenario can answer your question is by highlighting the possibility that the future could contain a different set of opportunities and risks than exist today.
It’s up to you to figure that out, but don’t do it alone. This is the time to get your stakeholders deeply involved, whether that is your team or a broader group of leaders with a say in the decision you’re focused on. Where you’ve been sharing progress updates along the way, now you want to design ways to create hands-on engagement. Interactive group workshops are the ideal tool, designed to bring the group along on the journey you’ve taken and start conversations that wouldn’t happen within the confines of day-to-day execution.
One useful set of generic prompts in these conversations is the classic five forces framework from business strategist Michael Porter. With a given scenario in mind, challenge yourself and your fellow stakeholders to envision how each of Porter’s five forces could be different. Then play out what opportunities and risks that change could contain.
| Threat of new entrants | Threat of substitutes | Bargaining power of customers | Bargaining power of suppliers | Competitive rivalry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Barriers to entry, economies of scale, capital requirements, access to distribution |
Substitutes available, propensity to switch, level of differentiation, switching costs |
Number of customers, order size, competitor differentiation, price sensitivity, information availability |
Number and size of suppliers, suppliers’ uniqueness, ability to substitute |
Number & diversity of competitors, industry concentration & growth, brand loyalty, switching costs |
Generate Options and Test Strategies
Given the new opportunities and risks that a scenario presents, how would you react? Would your current strategy work? What other options would you consider?
This is where futures thinking can directly inform strategy. Summarize the current strategy in whatever framework is familiar at your organization, such as the Salesforce V2MOM or Roger Martin’s Choice Cascade. Then work with your stakeholder group to collectively develop alternatives that respond to each of the opportunities and risks that you’ve identified earlier.
At a minimum, you’ll have a generative dialogue that will help prepare the group for what to do if something similar actually happens. By rehearsing those decisions today, you’ll be able to make them much faster when a real-life situation emerges. And if you’re lucky, you’ll identify new initiatives worth starting today in preparation for those possibilities.
One Scenario for the Future of Trust
Let’s do an exercise in shaping your choices using a scenario on a topic that matters deeply to us at Salesforce: trust. Trust is our #1 value, which means we're especially concerned about the widespread collapse of trust in technology and the companies that build it. What follows is one scenario that the Salesforce Futures team has built on how technology emerging today could have a positive impact on trust.
Scenario: Impact of Emerging Technology on Trust
It’s March 14, 2030. You’re about to celebrate your 24th birthday with some friends in downtown Memphis. Before you wrap up the day, you sit on the couch sorting through several promising options for your next project. Pulling up a proposal on your wall-screen, you begin reading.
It’s from a team that’s building a new carbon offset marketplace for micro-manufacturers in Latin America. They’re a partnership across an international NGO, an Austin-based startup, and a grassroots community agriculture organization.
Your AI assistant Ada found this opportunity for you because they need a stitcher—someone gifted at threading together modular software tools into workflows that create unique new value. While you think of yourself first and foremost as a musician, you’ve also gradually built up a track record of excellent credentials at stitching.
Potential collaborators can look in your public-facing digital wallet to see the boot-camp certification you’ve completed and the collaborator feedback on every project you’ve started, all stored in a tamper-proof format. Back when you were starting out, collaborators might not have found you or rated you so highly, because you hadn’t completed a formal degree.
“What’s the backstory on these people, Ada?” you ask. Ada pulls up their details on-screen, and you can see that each of the point people have used their public-facing digital wallets to show stellar feedback from their project collaborators over the years. Most importantly, you can see that when conflicts arise, they are responsive and transparent and do whatever it takes to keep relationships and projects on track.
“Wow…” you say under your breath, thinking about how different that sounds from some of your past engagements. Even better, their wallets also show a cluster of skills from their past projects that demonstrates a very strong fit for this effort. No wonder they’re comfortable striking up a three-way cross-organizational partnership, you think. This is looking exciting—adding an endorsement from this team to your own credentials could be a real boost.
You get up and move over to the open window, shifting over to the right where you can see the sun setting over the Mississippi River. You still have some questions about the project, which you rattle off to Ada. But for now, the hyacinths are blooming. The temperature is cooling off. And the solar streetlights around Memphis are ticking on one by one, as you hear the sound of a distant soundcheck carry through the air. It’s time to raise a glass to another year on Earth.
Response
Try responding to that scenario. You might not be turning 24 in 2030, but imagine that in 2030 you inhabit the same world as the stitcher described.
- Sense opportunities and risks. What more could you do if digital credentials allowed the reputation you built inside your company to be made visible to outsiders? Could it make it easier to strike up partnerships, find your next role, or work independently? Conversely, could one unfortunate project tarnish your reputation for good?
- Generate options and test strategies. If you believe this world would happen by 2030, what would you do differently today? Would you want to keep tabs on the tech for digital wallets and try them out as new versions emerge? Would you want to become a stitcher or some other kind of freelancer, seeing that the downsides will become easier to manage? On your own team, would you want to start expanding your use of freelancers?
Let Your Values Be Your Guide
Since you can now imagine some possible scenarios, it’s important to keep your values in mind as you choose which strategies to pursue, because your choices affect others. At Salesforce, we have our five corporate values of trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability.
Take equality. In reflecting on the scenario, let’s say you decide that shifting your team toward more freelancers makes sense. Consider:
- What measures would you want to take to keep security tight and get the visibility you want into their work?
- How much surveillance would you expect freelancers to accept? And what kind of a relationship with them would you construct?
- Would you prioritize working with freelancers who have solid credentials but lack a degree in order to offer opportunity to groups that start out with fewer advantages?
Going further than that, would you explore ways to use your corporate giving to establish workforce development programs that recruit disadvantaged groups into freelance stitching and offer them training? Whether you value equality and how deeply that value is held can inform how you answer those questions—and whether you prioritize addressing these questions over others.
With that, you’re ready to get to work. You have the basic tools to anticipate, imagine, and shape the future. Like anything, fluency comes with practice, so start small with some signal-spotting and build it into a habit. Find friends who like to talk about driving forces, mull over the uncertainties, and toy with scenarios. Bring it home to shape the decisions you need to make… and always use your values as your guide.
