A Design x Foresight Approach

A team builds a beautiful trend radar. The conversations are energetic, the possibilities exciting, and everyone leaves feeling better informed. Then nothing happens. For Steven Fisher, Innovation Leader and Design Futurist at McKinsey at the time of this conversation, the problem is often that the organization supported the activity without preparing to support the action.

In this episode of Innovation Rockstars, Fisher explains how design can make possible futures tangible and how backcasting can connect them to decisions that need to happen sooner. His concern is practical: a compelling vision has limited value if the people expected to build it cannot see where it fits into their work.

That perspective comes from someone who combines futures work with building technology, writing about entrepreneurship and, more recently, making wine. Thinking ahead matters to him because it gives people more room to do something about what comes next.

Make the future something people can understand

Asked to explain his job to his grandmother, Fisher keeps it simple: he looks at where things might go so teams can make better decisions earlier. His grandmother, he adds, is 96 and has already seen a great deal of change.

That ability to explain the work matters. Fisher sees design fiction and speculative prototypes as ways to help people understand futures they cannot yet experience. A report can describe a different world. A story or prototype gives people something more concrete to imagine living, working or playing with.

The purpose is not to persuade everyone that one forecast will come true. Fisher emphasizes multiple possible futures, including the uncomfortable possibility that the same development could be wonderful for one person and miserable for another. Product teams need room to examine those different experiences before committing to a preferred direction.

For R&D leaders, this makes communication part of the work itself. A future concept should help colleagues understand a choice and its consequences, rather than simply demonstrate how imaginative the research team can be.

Work backward, then keep watching

Fisher turns to backcasting when the conversation moves from possibilities to investment decisions. Start with where a product or organization might want to be in five, ten or twenty years, then work backward to the changes needed along the way.

This gives long-range thinking a connection to nearer-term choices. A product roadmap might cover 12 to 18 months; backcasting can expose decisions two, three or five years out that deserve attention before they enter that immediate planning window.

It also gives teams something to revisit. Fisher describes watching trends and signals as the future becomes the present. If a development arrives faster than expected, action may need to accelerate. If the evidence moves in another direction, an anticipated investment may no longer make sense.

The value lies in preparing choices and recognizing when their timing changes. A distant ambition becomes more useful when teams can identify what would make them move toward it, revise it or stop investing in it.

Arrange support for action before collecting possibilities

Fisher is direct about the gap between an engaging exercise and a useful outcome:

“I think there's a disconnect between the activity and the action.”

A futures workshop can create momentum because it lets people step outside everyday constraints. But reaching the end of an exercise does not automatically produce the funding, ownership or commitment needed to build something.

His advice is to involve the people who would benefit from the results and establish whether they can help carry the work forward. If the exercise identifies a promising project, will anyone be ready to work on it? Can the people supporting the research also support what follows?

Those questions belong near the beginning. Otherwise, a team can produce increasingly sophisticated scenarios while leaving the same organizational obstacle untouched. Better research alone cannot resolve a missing commitment to act.

Give engineers a reason to participate

Chris Mühlroth raises a familiar tension: a strategy group imagines the future, while the engineers expected to implement it feel that their technical experience has been overlooked.

Fisher suggests finding people who are already interested in futures thinking and connecting participation to their actual work. Opportunities to develop a product, build team capability or advance personal development can make the contribution meaningful. People should feel they are doing valuable work, rather than volunteering for an additional exercise alongside everything else.

“People want to feel connected to a positive future, but they very much need tangible outcomes sooner.”

Backcasting can help make that connection. It brings the conversation closer to decisions that teams recognize and can influence. Fisher does not present this as the only answer, but as an approach he has found useful.

Make the methods easier to share

Fisher wants futures thinking to become more accessible, much as design thinking spread beyond design departments. Shared research, accessible training and practical tools can help people participate without first becoming specialists.

His experience writing The Startup Equation with his wife gives that ambition a personal dimension. Writing together, he jokes, is an effective way to get to know your spouse. The process revealed their strengths and areas for growth, while helping them turn entrepreneurial experience into something other people could use.

That same ambition runs through his approach to foresight: make useful knowledge easier to apply. For a leader preparing the next futures exercise, the immediate question is who will help turn its findings into work the organization is ready to do.