ABOUT ME
I aM WOODY WADE
I’m a scenario planning specialist, author, speaker, and educator.
For more than 20 years, I’ve been helping senior decision-makers and leadership teams explore how their business landscape could change in the future — and what those changes might mean for them.
Before that, I spent my career inside organizations myself. Which is probably why I’m less interested in abstract theories about the future than in a much more practical question:
➔ If you’re responsible for the future success of a company, what might happen in your strategic environment that you haven’t thought seriously enough about?
– HOW I GOT HERE –
A somewhat indirect route to foresight expertise
I began my career in marketing rather than foresight. After getting my MBA from Harvard Business School, I settled here in Switzerland where I’ve worked in a number of different organizations, among them the World Economic Forum in Geneva, where I served on the Executive Board, and later, as Marketing Director, I helped reposition the renowned Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne as an industry-focused business school.
Along the way, I became increasingly interested in a problem every organization faces:
You often have to make decisions today — sometimes really big ones — whose success will depend on how your future environment evolves. But that’s something you cannot know and have very little (or, more likely, no) control over. How can you deal with all that uncertainty?
That intriguing challenge led me to foresight, which eventually became the full-time focus of my work. For more than two decades now, I’ve used scenario planning with organizations around the world, helping leaders look beyond the one future they may be expecting (and hoping for), and explore plausible alternatives that could unfold instead.
As of today, my work has taken me to more than 35 countries, in person or virtually. Thinking about the future is the most stimulating work I could ever imagine. And doing so in a way that helps organizations grapple with choices in the present is very, very rewarding.
– WHAT I ACTUALLY DO –
Hint: I don’t predict the future (fortunately!)
The future has an irritating habit of refusing to cooperate with predictions. You may have noticed this yourself.
So instead of trying to forecast what will happen, my work is about something different: helping you notice the assumptions you’re making about what comes next, and then probing what might happen if those assumptions turn out to be wrong.
→ Sometimes I do that with an entire leadership team through scenario planning.
→ Sometimes with a roomful of people through a keynote or Master Class.
→ And one-to-one through The What If? Conversation.
The format changes, but the underlying instinct doesn’t: Challenge the expected future. Explore what else could happen. And really pay attention when something makes you stop and think.
– BOOKS / THINKING –
Writing gives me another way to do essentially the same thing I do in a room with executives: take an assumption about the future — and keep poking at it.
– SOME KEY COORDINATES –
A few highlights from my CV
If you want all the gory details, please visit my LinkedIn profile. But I’d prefer not to rest on past laurels. The future is where all the action is!
– THE OTHER SIDE OF MY WORK –
The future is a serious subject. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m a solemn person.
Thinking about uncertainty can become awfully earnest awfully quickly.
I’ve always believed people think better when they’re curious, involved, stimulated, and enjoying themselves. So whether I’m working with a CEO, a board or company leadership team, or a classroom of Master’s degree students, I’m quite happy if a serious discussion occasionally produces some laughter. Or triggers a small gasp of amazement at a sudden realization. Or just gets people excited.
When I conduct a workshop, write, teach, interview interesting people, or simply ask pesky questions, it’s because I want to see what unusual places this thinking might lead. And it almost always does.
A sense of curiosity is the common denominator of almost everything I do.
All in all…
– I HAVE THE GREATEST JOB IN THE WORLD –
Still curious after all these years
I've spent most of my career helping people think about things that haven't happened yet. My work is fascinating and very often surprising. It blends creativity with structure, and delivers real strategic value.
That's why I still find it so interesting. After more than 20 years, I still enjoy discovering a possibility or asking a question that makes someone stop and say, “Hmm. I hadn't thought about it that way.”
The future never runs out of questions. And there’s always a good conversation about it waiting to happen.