Area of focus
My role
Team members
Futures studies
Scenarios
Strategy development
Strategist
Design researcher
Nannini Lee Balki
Dasami Moodley
Jordyn Rowntree
Daniel Ura
Research question: How can Rexall capitalize on the growing use of digital technologies at the intersection of customer engagement, community outreach, and traditional healthcare services?
The project
The ability to have consistent two-way conversations can be further leveraged by making Rexall more competitive with digital incumbents and making them aware of unexpressed and unmet customer needs.
As part of our Strategy Development course, we used Rexall as a case study to explore new strategic options for the organization.
The method.
The scenarios.
We used two foresight methods to connect futures to strategy. The first was scenario planning to envision how possible futures might look. Scenarios are stories that describe alternative ways the external environment might develop in the future. Each scenario explores how different conditions might support or constrain the delivery of policy and strategy objectives. The scenarios were followed by windtunnelling, an exercise used to develop and test strategy responses. This is a method for testing strategic objectives against a set of scenarios to see how well they stand up against a range of external conditions.
After much data collection, we developed two critical uncertainties that most affected Rexall - digital leverage and community engagement.
Digital leverage - The process through which Rexall builds strong, resilient relationships with members of the community; whether that consists of individuals, organizations, or both. This is an effort to bring stakeholders together to achieve and maintain a collective vision for the community that benefits everyone.
Community engagement - It is not an absence or lack of technology. Rather digital leverage refers to the inability to use digital technologies to one's social or economic advantage due to numerous factors such as accessibility or knowledge.
By intersecting these axes, we developed four possible scenarios in the year 2022.
Connection over connectivity - The world cherishes physical community engagement over the "connectivity" of digital friends as the longing to feel included surpasses the desire to achieve a digital presence.
Fractured society - Smaller, more mobile and immersive technologies foster social seclusion and hyper-individualized needs. The public sphere is deteriorating as a result. These new technologies are catalyzing new customer habits faster than businesses could respond. Read the scenario here.
Connection through connectivity - Digital platforms are important for connecting you and your family to healthcare programs. Organizations will be competing for inventive and creative ways to meaningfully cater to the aging baby boomer demographic.
Gotta collect them all - The Internet of Things has evolved into the Internet of Everything. Policies, laws, and regulations around data tracking and ownership are loosening. Organizations will vie to make sense of the data they collect from their customers. This puts consent for data collection before any customer engagement action.
Windtunnelling.
This exercise was used to explore how different scenarios might affect strategic objectives. It was important to identify which objectives were robust across the full range of scenarios and which needed to be modified if conditions change in the future.
