Hand each of your customers a few pieces of paper. Ask them to imagine that it is sometime in the future and that they’ve been using your product almost continuously between now and that future date (it could be a month, quarter, year, or, for strategic planning purposes, five years or even a decade—pick a time frame that is appropriate for your research goals). Now, ask them to go even further—an extra day, week, month. Ask your customer to write down, in as much detail as possible, exactly what your product will have done to make them happy (or successful or rich or safe or secure or smart; choose the set of adjectives that works best for your product). Click here to understand other characteristics of the game.

Note: The phrasing of the question is extremely important. You’ll get different results if you ask “What should the system do?” instead of “What will the system have done?” (If you’re skeptical, just try it.)

This game is based on numerous studies in cognitive psychology that have examined how we think about the future. When we ask the question “What will our product do?” we’re left with an open-ended future, one in which every possible future is equally plausible. Of course, this isn’t strictly true, and to answer the question we will pick a possible future and describe it. However, the lack of a concrete outcome means that we don’t have to deal with the details of how our product will have done it. Others will tend to judge our answers as “hollow” or “lacking substance,” because there is no requirement that this is actually the future that will materialize.

The results change rather dramatically when we alter the wording of the question. When we ask “What will our product have done?” we are thinking of a future event as one that already has occurred—“remembering” the future. Because this event is “in the past,” we must mentally generate a sequence of events that caused this event to have occurred. We not only have a more concrete idea of what the product did, we can begin to answer the question “How did the product do it?” Others will tend to judge our answers as more richly detailed, more sensible, and more plausible, precisely because if an outcome or future is thought of as already accomplished, it can be more easily described.

This isn’t to say that the event we envision will actually occur, or that each customer who plays the game will generate the same result. Actually predicting the future is not really the purpose of Remember the Future (although if you have success in doing this, please let me know). What is important is that Remember the Future enables you to not only understand your customers’ definition of success, but also their understanding of how that successful outcome happened.

It helps to draw a timeline to make certain you’re really remembering a future event as if it were the past. In Figure 2.7, the current date is February 2. In step 1, we project forward into the future to March 30 and ask our customer to remember their use of our product as of March 15 (a date that is in the future).

Vary the timeline to get different results. If you want to understand more about your near-term product plans, choose weeks, months, or quarters. If you want to understand more about how customers envision very general topics or issues regarding strategic evolution, consider projecting a decade or more into the future.

Practice how you phrase the question and how you present the game to your customers. This is especially important, as outlined in the sidebar “Framing the Question.”

You can structure this game to deal with more than one question. This approach is suitable for strategic planning purposes, when you have multiple facets of the future that you want to explore. This also allows this game to scale to rather large group sizes.

Consider letting customers know about the broad topics you’d like to explore before the game to allow them to mentally prepare for the game.

Because this game is one of the easiest to play, there isn’t a lot of need for detailed advice. But don’t be misled by the simplicity of the game—the magic lies in the discussion of how your customers perceive their future. To get to this discussion, you can

• Encourage customers to work individually, letting them know that at the end of the game each will be asked to present their results to the group.

• Request that customers work as a group, which is useful for when you want a chosen group of customers to work together answering a common question. If you choose this option, appoint a group leader who is responsible for capturing the results of the group and being the spokesperson during the discussion phase.

  See Figure 2.8 Playing Remember the Future with Multiple Groups

• Encourage customers to work any way they choose, either individually or as a team.

During the presentation phase, give a few minutes for each person to describe his or her answers. Then explicitly invite other participants to comment on this particular version of the future.

The primary processing step for this game is to compare your current product development road maps with your newfound understanding of how your customers perceive their future. The following areas are worthy of exploration:

• To what extent do your road maps result in a product that meets your customers’ perceptions of their future requirements?

• To what extent do your customers' vision of their future significantly alter your plans? How? Why?

One easel with flip chart paper for each group of customers playing the game, plus an additional easel for the facilitator.

I often use Remember the Future whenever I want to generate a detailed plan of how I’m going to successfully complete a project, from planning the release of a software project, closing a large or complex sale, preparing for a conference, or even planning an Innovation Game (as suggested in Part One). The earliest picture I have of using Remember the Future to help plan events is a Polaroid from Dave Smith, who facilitated this game for the Aurigin team in 1997 to plan the installation of a complex software system (Figure 2.6 is a scan of that Polaroid). The project was successfully completed, in large part because this game enabled everyone to focus on the specific sequence of events that resulted in a fully deployed system.

It can take time for a team playing Remember the Future to become comfortable with the wording of the question. The best way to do this is to practice with both forms of the question for a given product. Let’s suppose that one of the benefits of your product is that it helps customers save money.

1. Imagine it is one year in the future. How will our product save you money?

2. Imagine it is one year in the future. How has our product saved you money?

Consider your own response to these questions. In the first form, you might find yourself wondering about the many possible ways your product could save money, but not feeling comfortable with any one way.

Contrast this with the second form of the question, in which you’re likely to start thinking of very specific ways in which your product saved you money.

What distinguishes Remember the Future from simply asking about a future event is the level of detail that customers generate when answering questions framed in the future tense of the verb. Suppose, for example, that we’d like to get a sense about who will win the next FIFA World Cup.

The simplest way to frame the question is, “Who will win the next FIFA World Cup?” Asked this way, you’re likely to answer with just enough detail to justify your prediction: “France emerged as the lone European country to make it through the quarter-finals through a combination of excellent goal tending and solid free kicks. They easily won their semi-finals and turned in a great match in the finals.”

Framing it in the future-perfect tense results in, ”Imagine that it is the day after the next FIFA World Cup. Who will have won?” You might also say France, but notice that right away your mind is drawn to answering why did France win? The easiest way to put your mind at ease it to answer that question. And the more detail you put into answering the question, the better you feel.

The end result is often more like, “France was the unlikely winner after a grueling set of matches played over several weeks. Their goal-keeper was spectacular in the first round, establishing the French team as the team to beat. In the quarter-finals, the French goal keeper made more than 12 saves, giving his team confidence to aggressively and relentlessly attack Brazil, resulting in the lone and deciding goal in the 80th minute of play. The aggressive play continued in the semi-finals, where the French outscored Argentina 3 to nil. Finally, the combination of aggressive attacking and continued brilliant goal tending allowed the French to beat Mexico 2 to 1 in the finals.”

It is important to note that in both cases we can see plausible explanations of how the future will unfold. The second example, however, contains the rich and detailed explanations of the future that you can leverage to better understand your customers’ definition of success.