How to Mindfully Create the Future

Wishing for a smarter future that’s more clear, creative and actionable?

C’EST WHAT? LLC advocates a method that’s been honed and proven through our experience over the past 25 years — developing foresights, future road maps, innovation platforms and new concepts.

Future-focused creativity skills

Sensory Stimulation: Provoking new thinking by stimulating sight, sound, taste, touch and emotion. By stimulating our minds, we open up new neural pathways, new connection points and new ways of looking at existing problems.
Defining the Quest: Clarifying and refining the right framing of exploration, asking the right questions helps us design the bold ambitions that will drive our future thinking forward in new ways.
Stretching Imagination: Expanding the panorama of possible ideas enables teams to generate fresh avenues of thinking. We can help you broaden the continuum from low hanging fruit to metaphorical and seemingly absurd concepts that can be eventually refined to new realities.
Diverge/Converge: Thinking divergently means temporarily suspending disbelief and generating a plethora of early stage nuggets of bigger ideas. We then build on each others ideas, remain playful and then converging into energetic themes that address the core innovation challenge.
Headlines and Connections: Expressing ideas in succinct ways open up invitations for others to connect with your mindset. Thus, we learn to convey the “news” and then back up our POV as needed for clarity and context.
Mindfulness: Leveraging mindfulness tools and methods to enable your teams to see new possibilities that are unfiltered by anxiety and expressed without judgement. Mindfulness has been proven to facilitate better decision-making, less anxiety and more clear thinking.
Empathic Listening: Listening so others are heard, valuing their ideas and inviting future contributions when ideas first seem absurd leads to creation of more powerful themes and strategic concepts.

Foresights and Future Platform Skills

Evolutionary Exploration: Forming thoughtful questions and vectors of exploration that are non-judgmental, stimulating new thinking about possible futures. We approach the question-asking phase through several lenses, depending on the nature of the innovation challenge. Some questions are more pragmatic, some are more poetic and metaphorical All the questions are designed to open up new thought patters.
Curious Clues: Early stage facts that represent possible emerging trends are created to provoke more questions and conversations. At C’EST WHAT? We present these faint beacons of the future with images, headlines and prose that balances what is with what could be.
Time Flipping: How to preview your history in ways that enable analysis of past decisions and defaults that led your organization to the current state. Did you envision the future that actually unfolded in your industry and your brand? Where and why were you correct in your assumptions and where/why were you misguided and what happened along the way.
Drivers of Change: What are the environmental scenarios influencing your potential future? How might we discern between trends, clues and larger drivers of change from which broader scenarios can be derived?
Consequences: How to explore consequences about alternative scenarios that are likely to impact your business in meaningful ways. For example, what are the potential impacts on talent, finance, operations, design, marketing and leadership based on decisions you make and potential innovation actions you take.
Themes and Platforms: How to identify, evolve and convey major innovation platforms from which a spectrum of services, experiences and products can emerge over several years. Platforms are strategic choices that respond to emerging changes in consumer or marketplace behavior and unmet desires.