You must think broadly in a complex, rapidly changing world.

At the basis of our competitive analysis is the application of a tool called STEEP Analysis. Used by futurists, this mnemonic device reminds us to consider a wide variety of trends outside of our own industry, specifically:

• Social trends: aging populations, urbanization, mixed families, increased prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and kidney failure
• Technology trends: increased distribution of GPS, IPv6 networking, decreasing price and increase application of robotics in the home, genomic medicine, electric automobiles, nanotechnology
• Economic trends: Real estate occupancy rates, unemployment rates, sovereign debt, household debt, corporate debt, government intervention in markets, corporate merger and acquisition activity, energy factors, raw material availability
• Ecological trends: Water availability, biodiversity, soil health, wetlands integrity, climate change
• Political trends: Legislation, regulation, political parties, authoritarianism versus liberal democracy

You may notice that only a few of these factors show up on the radar of many strategic planning tools. A "Balanced Scorecard" approach might deal with external market factors in a general sense, such as interest rates, unemployment (talent availability), M&A activity and energy costs as it attempts to evaluate "risk." The rest of the data collected focuses on internal factors, which is the focus ofthe vast majority of managerial activities. This is a reasonable approach in a time of relative growth and stability.

Clearly, we are no longer living in a time that warranty such assumptions about stability. As such, leaders need to redouble the resources they provide to the external factors explored in the STEEP methedology. We cannot stress enough - we know how much this flies in the face of modern management. Very few people are in the "nanotechnology" business, or the "aging populations" business. As such, there will little space in quantitative management for a proper understanding the of the risk - AND OPPORTUNITY - that such strategic shifts indeed promise. Leaders need to make space, incorporating such broad analysis into all of their other activities, such as marketing, supply chain management, sales, finance, and product development. In this day and age, strategic shifts are not optional and not frivolous wastes of intellectual time. Modern strategic management requires not only understanding STEEP trends, but more importantly, understanding their implications for the organization.

Competitive Futures specializes not only in a the collection and analysis of STEEP trends, but also in the distillation of implications so our clients can benefit from major change.

All foresight must start with hard data from reliable sources.

Competitive Futures has a unique methodology when it comes to guiding its clients into the future - we actually provide data on how the world is changing in the coming five to twenty years to help clients understand what they should do in the short-term.

This may seem like an incredibly obvious activity. Naturally, if you are planning for anything you should get the best data. The interesting thing about the future is that the majority of executives don't do this.

A simple exercise - ask a colleague "What are the top three strategic trends impacting your organization?" Could it be fluctuating raw material prices? Rapidly shifting customer demographics? Tectonically important technological shifts due to mobile communications? Water shortage?

After more than a decade of providing insight to leaders of business and government, we have discovered than less than 2% of managers at major organizations are able to name important strategic trends off the top of their heads. This isn't purely negligence; there are strong motivations for keeping people focused uniquely on the next quarter. An economy in rapid fluctuation is likely to make managers focus on what is right in front of them to assure survival. Of course, there is also the perennial concern of publicly-traded company basing compensation on quarterly performance as a proxy for making the stock price improve. Still, the future doesn't especially care whether you have time to study its trends - it is coming to change your business model for good and for bad regardless of whether your compensation package is attuned to this longer-range perspective.

This is why, simply put, we get the data about future trends for our clients. Competitive Futures provides custom research about where our clients' markets are heading so they can make better decisions, faster than their competitors. After years of doing this very specific type of strategic research, we are best in the world at finding superior, reliable sources of insight about how the world is changing. In many cases, we have personal relationships with the top researchers and analysts in their respective fields of expertise. This is why we deliver more reliable information in shorter time frames on future trends such as:

• Customer demographics
• Human resources talent pool availability
• Economic indicators
• Raw material supply and demand
• Science and technology research and development
• Import and export
• International risk
• Global lifestyles

After more than ten years in the business, Competitive Futures maintains a constantly updated database of trends that form the basis of many of our successful research projects for the world's most innovative organizations.

Quality foresight depends on expert opinion built on hard data.

The fourth step in our unique Future Intelligence methodology is forecast assessment, a crucial practice to be combined with rigorous trend research. In addition to looking at general trends, Competitive Futures seeks out the best forecasts from expert sources to improve our clients' foresight.

Why go to world experts for forecasts, and why assess them? More importantly, can't those experts just tell us everything we need to know about the future?

A few observations based on our years of looking at highly technical forecasts:

If you need to know about the future of a branch of technology, for example, there is no subsitute for actually going to the people researching the generation of that technology to understand what is coming next, and in what timeframe. Let's say you want to know about the future of biotechnology. Sure, you can wait for a Popular Mechanics special issue, a white paper from the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences, or even a nice series from the New York Times Sunday Paper; all of these will give you a general view of what's next. Competitive Futures will actually contact the scientists working on the creation of the next generation of gene sequencers, as well as those who made the last three generations of the same. Often, the number of people with world-class insight into the future of a branch of technology is a fairly manageable number, and they will tell you about when they expect certain discoveries. So if they say they "likely" expect $100 human gene sequences to be possible by 2020, you can then revisit those forecasts to ask what this will mean for pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, grocery stores, pharmacists, hospitals, etc.

But why not just wait for those luminaries to put out their own intellectual work showing the future implications of what they do?

In our experience, that's simply not what most experts do. With the exception of certain visionaries who understand the engineering and its implications (Andy Grove, Bill Gates, the late Richard Smalley) experts are usually focused on their actual work and its impact on directly associated scientific and economic activity. It is up to futurists and strategists at the client level to consider the broader implications of the work, which is coincidentally the next step in the Future Intelligence process.