What is “Future State” and Why is it Important?

Future state is ultimately the greater vision for your business, the result of the determination and evaluation of its conditions, structures, technological infrastructure and organizational resources. It has to do with knowing what’s happening within your processes and identifying the areas of pain and possible improvement in order to map out how you’re going to achieve your future state. It’s where you want to be, your long-term goal in terms of the ever-changing state of technology and how that applies to your present-day business. Not only defining your future state but actually getting to that point involves mapping out both your current state of business and what it should look like in the future, along with a number of steps to take along the way.

Combine Forces

To know what your future state is supposed to be and how to reach that point starting from today involves a joint effort. Get ahead of the game by pulling together members of your team across different functions. Hold a session or a workshop led by an experienced facilitator, such as those at Third Stage Consulting, that can help guide them towards laying out those steps needed to reach your future state. It’s imperative to have the consultation from someone who has experience and knows how to get to the point of what is critical of your processes. This facilitator can help document your current state and pinpoint the pain points and challenges. This facilitator can ask the questions on processes improvements and steer your cross-functional team in the right direction, coaxing from them the ideas that may already exist that they hadn’t yet realized.

Talk to Your Team 

If a colleague disagrees, it’s likely due to lack of engagement on the front end. Although you can’t fully eliminate resistance, bringing in the people who are doing the processes cross-functionally and engaging them can certainly decrease resistance. Building a case for your approach, preferably a case that is data-driven, will help to reach a general consensus. Making a strong case includes quantifying specific benefits and growth opportunities and tie those to the goals of the business. This starts and ends with Organizational Change Management, whose job it is to about help your people adapt to the differences that will occur while you’re on your way to achieving your future state. More than communication and training, it’s about analyzing what those impacts are and why it’s worth it for your people.

Find the Proper Approach

Sure, you could do a blanketed copy of another organization’s best practices, but that comes with some risk. Identifying the proper approach for your business depends on knowing your organization and knowing what you need to look for. If you start with a blanketed copy of someone else’s best practices, you could be leaving out the things that make your business different and unique, which could cause you to miss out on the competitive advantage of your own organization. If you do go that route, it needs to be strategic. Consider instead copying just certain processes, selecting which ones are most critical to your business and keeping them unique to what your needs. 

Highlight Your Specialties

As a business, work on an understanding of who you are and what makes you special and build upon that. Specifically, work with the people on your team that have the expertise around those processes that separate you from your competitors. From there, learn through how to improve within the context of those unique processes. Everyone thinks their business is unique, and a lot of them are in certain processes, but there are a lot of areas of unrealized commonalities. Identifying the areas of your business in which you are unique starts with a strategic discussion with your leaders — about where you land in the marketplace, what your competitors are doing, and your customer feedback. Customer feedback is a particularly critical aspect, which includes understanding why your customers are seeking you out and why they stay with you.

Have a Process Map

The process map can vary depending on the organization. No matter the organization, it is good to have a map of some level of detail for reference, one that people can track. Some organizations may need to get more in depth determining what their steps are, while others may find that it’s enough to have just a framework in order to have people on the same page. Either way, this map will identify your opportunities for improvement and ways to change how you’re doing business, which could include anything from shifting the way you’re communicating, to restructuring teams, to finding technology opportunities. A process map might stop you mid-transformation initiative and make you re-assess the direction you’re moving in. It might make you rethink how you’re prioritizing processes or how you’re evaluating and differentiating between technologies.

So, What’s the Point? 

            Technology is moving, and fast, and your future state is coming quicker than you realize. Changes to processes are essentially forced upon businesses, and it’s now or never to roll with those changes. You have an opportunity to look at the changing scenarios and forecast what things will look like in the future. It’s the time to get a handle on your processes and ensure that they’re robust enough to be able to adapt when changes arise, which they inevitably will. Change is all around, and it’s a matter of either letting change control you, or you being able to appropriately respond to and thus control change. By being on top of your processes and continually reevaluating them, you’re enabling yourself to be able to respond to changes more quickly and to do so in a way that’s not completely reactive. It’s all about continuous improvement, and you need to have a discipline around that which you can maintain over time. Defining your future state is imperative to being timely, keeping competitive, and staying alive.