Institute plans centre to increase firms' future focus

“The objective, in short, is to help organisations survive 100 more years,” executive director Santhi Kanoktanaporn said last week.
The unit of the Industry Ministry is working with Shaping Tomorrow, a United Kingdom-based company, to establish the centre, which should start helping Thai organisations in the latter part of the 2016 fiscal year, beginning with manufacturers before expanding to agriculture and service enterprises.
The centre’s tasks are expected to involve researching future changes and disseminating the knowledge to private and public planning agencies, developing “futurists” and helping to build the capacity of organisations in developing scenario planning.
Santhi, who assumed the FTPI’s top post last October, said he would like to expand the role of the |institute beyond assisting organisations to make incremental improvements to their operations.
“I think we have not yet succeeded, since we have been only able to help ‘improve’ organisations. We have not really been able to |help them ‘develop’ another step,” he said.
Due to the accelerating pace of changes, organisations that can survive in this era must either be able to “catch the signals” of future trends or can “reshape” what will happen in the future, he added.
Michael Jackson, chairman of Shaping Tomorrow, said scenario planning had become an important tool for every company in today’s world.
The firm counts 1,000 changes occurring every week.
Santhi said “future focus” is one of the Thailand Quality Awards’ criteria and scenario planning is one of its principal tools to achieve that qualification.
“We have been teaching stuff like lean management, six sigma, ISO – all of them are tools for improvement. But to leapfrog, an organisation needs to have innovations.
“Organisation can jump into a total new area that was unexpected, if they have a foresight capability,” he said.