The Memory of the Future™ is a consulting program that creates a synthetic picture of an organization's anticipated future environment in order to support the process of proactive collaborative management of its future strategy.
According to the observations about how people unconsciously prepare for the future made by the Swedish neurobiologist David Ingvar, a part of the human brain "is constantly occupied with making up action plans and programs for the future," making "alternative time paths into the future," and "storing these alternative time paths." This "memory of the future" helps us to establish a "correspondence between incoming information and one of the stored alternative time paths," perceiving its "meaning." It also allows us to filter out irrelevant information that has no meaning for any of the "options for the future which we worked out" (quoted from Arie de Geus).
Unfortunately, enterprises are lacking the sense-making filter that is naturally available to human beings. That is why they are easily submerged by constant flow of information. Most of the information collected by various departments in a company is never shared or used. The inability to quickly assess the real value of incoming information for future decisions and the absence of a shared information clearing house lead to poorly prepared decisions on one side and to "decision paralysis" on the other.
Our consulting services help create the organization's "memory of the future," thus facilitating sense-making and early warning processes, as well as putting the strategic discussions in an enterprise into the context of its future business environment.
By putting in front of decision makers a shared "memory of the future", we are shifting the focus of discussions, as Arie de Geus proposed, from "whether something will happen" to "what would we do, if it happened." We force decision makers to "live in the future," to go back and forth in time, to "try on" various alternative futures, thus helping executives to make an important step towards proactive leadership.