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Accelerating Business Development with Futures Design

Jon Styrkestad Haukaas
  • Jon Styrkestad Haukaas
  • Partner, Co-Head of Manyone OSL
Julie Haugan

As a key strategic pillar and the driving force for accelerating Aker Solution's transition towards renewables, we helped the leadership team explore, challenge, and get specific about the future of its new engineering consultancy venture.

From a thousand PowerPoint slides to a tangible vision of the future

To build a strong vision and lay the foundation for a successful business venture, we needed a process, methodology, and tools to better understand the changes shaping the future of the business, industry, customers’ expectations – and the world around us.
Our Futures Design methodology was at the core of our collaboration with Aker Solutions to ensure just that. Laying the foundation for the organisation to shift its mindset to anticipating rather than reacting and enabling co-creation across functions and with external partners.

Three key components from our future vision process to ignite change:

01: Future Context

We developed future scenarios based on signals of change observable in the present — with the potential to disrupt, shape or influence the future of energy and consultancy.

Gaining a deeper understanding of the drivers of plausible futures enabled more flexible and strategic decision-making on how the business can grow and provide value in the future.

We involved domain experts from across Aker Solutions and the rest of the Aker Group to discuss emerging shifts and plausible futures — and to challenge our first iterations of beliefs and bets.
02: Core Vision Model

Co-create the business

We developed a framework combining elements from business development, service design, and brand strategy — to identify and challenge our beliefs about the future of this business.

Using this framework, we were able to iteratively address and define everything from potential business models, products, and services to positioning and culture.

03: Tangible Artefact

A way to show, rather than tell, what the future can be like

This is where storytelling, conceptualisation, and design fiction came into play.

Recognisable on the surface, yet speculative and even provocative the deeper you dig, the future vision artefact is a powerful tool to make the future tangible and enable the organisation to get specific and drive the business development forward.

Describing everything from future products and offerings to the kinds of projects they are working on with which clients and partners – the artefact serves as a prototype of the future.
"The artefact explains our strategy, gives us a tool to get into future-back mode, and is a sandbox which allows us to test new ideas and business models."
Mette Freisner Johansen Senior Manager, Organisational Development, Aker Solutions
Since its origin in 2022, the artefact has been a platform for testing concepts and fostering discussion among stakeholders. The project's innovative blend of strategic foresight and business development tools has gained attention throughout the Nordics. In May 2024, Aker Solutions achieved a significant milestone with the successful launch of their new consultancy arm, Entr.
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Read more: How we create meaningful change with energy and utility companies

Ready to ignite change in your business?

Jon Haukaas

Partner and Managing Director

jon.haukaas@manyone.com
+47 93082950


Reach out today, and we'll be happy to tell you more about our approach, experience, and client results.

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Client: Aker Solutions
Topics: Strategy and Innovation, Leadership and Change, Energy
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