Strategic thinking lecture

Roger Coathup, CEO of 21 Thoughts, recently gave a lecture on strategic thinking and planning to Sports Management undergraduates at Northumbria University.  Following the lecture he facilitated two workshop style seminars on futures thinking for sports businesses.

Case studies including the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, the brand identity of Apple, indirect marketing by Hummel, MySpace, the Google aquisition of YouTube, and dependency on ‘galacticos’ at Real Madrid and in the NBA, were used to illustrate corporate strategic planning, and to provide a stimulus for an interactive discussion of the challenges of thinking strategically.

Sport is a particularly interesting area for the futurist: from changes in health and cultural attitudes, through the impact of the 2012 Olympics, to the role and interactions of sport with the global political environment.

Working with undergraduates can provide a different perspective and offer insights that add significant value to those typically expressed when working with business executives.  The seminars following this lecture were particularly successful:

Looking ahead to a horizon year of 2012, the first seminar group examined the key driving forces that would shape the world in which the FC Barcelona sporting ‘empire’ operates.  The second group considered the world from the perspective of a major online sports gambling business.

Each seminar group examined 6 generic driving forces:

• world of work
• global politics
• social trends
• the energy crisis
• control of new media
• customer preferences

and then looked for key driving forces specific to their businesses.  For FC Barcelona those forces were:

• TV rights / media coverage
• obesity
• Chelsea FC
• transfer legislation
• terrorism

And for the online sports gambling business:

• disposable income
• social acceptability
• available leisure time
• legislation
• taxation
• mega casinos
• new mobile technology

The final task at the seminars was arranging the driving forces on an impact / uncertainty chart.  Understanding the impact and uncertainty of driving forces is crucial when looking at the future worlds in which your business will operate.  They are particularly useful when developing alternative scenarios of the future.  If a driving force has a high impact on the world in which you operate and is uncertain, i.e. it could develop in different directions, then it could lead to different plausible futures (scenarios) which you should consider in your strategic planning.

Thanks are due to Dina Futre at Northumbria University for arranging the session.

Download scenario planning: an introduction (pdf, 0.3MB)