2022 Annual Conference – Building Future-Ready Leaders: Developing Skills Across the Enterprise to Identify and Embrace New Growth Opportunities

For more than 60 years, W. L. Gore & Associates, has developed its leaders through experience. In 2013, when it was time for this renowned innovation company to refine its enterprise strategy, the CEO looked past her executive team members and placed responsibility for developing the corporate strategy with a group of emerging leaders.  She envisioned these younger leaders growing into enterprise roles over the next decade and inheriting the strategy they helped create. Today, these individuals are in critical roles that identify and realize new growth opportunities across the enterprise.  They are the stewards of innovation decisions and investments, and they are deeply informed through dynamic interactions with an unfolding future. In 2020, a second group of leaders learned futures skills through a new set of challenging experiences, and Gore created a more distributed way of engaging leaders in learning and applying strategic foresight to include individuals from all businesses, functions, regions, and age groups. In this interactive workshop, participants will explore how Gore partnered with the Institute for the Future to create intensive learning experiences for current and future leaders that transformed their experience with the future and that developed essential skills for identifying and embracing new growth opportunities, as well as developing approaches to address new threats.  This session will reveal the design considerations, guided experiences, and support systems that led to these leaders mastering Strategic Foresight and Futures Thinking capabilities while shaping a new strategy for Gore.  

This session content is grounded in scholarship on adult and executive learning and illustrated by futures concepts and experiences. Audience members will benefit from participating by:

• Reviewing the experiential designs.
• Engaging in some of the strategic foresight experiences, and
• Exploring how this approach could enhance how they could build futures skills in their future leaders of innovation through designed experiences.