Syncing client strategies with today’s realities and tomorrow’s opportunities.
dbForesites’s groundbreaking thoughtwork is reality-based and functionally oriented. Our rigorously objective approach will identify advantages, synergies, strengths, and opportunities, but it will also diagnose risks, deficiencies, weaknesses, and threats with absolute candor. Led by visionary Founder, Dan French, few other organizations can translate fast-moving megatrends into sophisticated macro strategy and appropriately tailored tactical application in real time.
dbForesites deep cross-disciplinary expertise and proprietary analytics develops actionable intelligence designed to make direct impacts on your critical interests and dramatically improve your clarity of vision going forward. Reaching through the historic crosscurrents now manifest in the modern macro-environment, our uncommonly high caliber capability will pierce the confusion of the day and directly respond to your specific and immediate concerns.
Our sharp-angled approach and powerful analysis will help you reevaluate your resources, reconsider your constraints and reorient your strategies to seize new opportunities. In this era of low visibility and high flux, dbForesites functions as an orienting beacon, charting current events into meaningful context within the relevant sweep of history, so you can better navigate the needs of the day and plot a more resilient, reliable course towards your most abundant horizon.
Distinctly, beyond specific guidance, retaining dbForesites will also make an immediate difference in your decision-making processes. Engaging and collaborating with the dbForesites team will invigorate, inspire, and elevate your own team and give your group a lasting edge going forward, far beyond any specific initiative, project, plan, or transaction.
Delivery Formats
Brainstorming Sessions & Stakeholder Salons
Leverage dbForesites’s big thinking and brilliant perspective to build critical thinking, create new ideas and facilitate intellectual collaboration amongst stakeholders and decision-makers. dbForesites leads dynamic dialogues and interdisciplinary brainstorming salons in cities around the world for public and private sector stakeholders. While each salon or session can be structured with variable degrees of advanced preparation, these impactful conversations are always intimate, candid, and thought-provoking events that invite frank discussion and spark fresh ideas.
Troubleshooting Sessions & Tailored Presentations
Data rich and deeply thoughtful, troubleshooting sessions and tailored presentations are bespoke engagements built from scratch to suit the unique conditions and circumstances of each geography, each market, each project/transaction and each client. Through various guided discussions and exercises, dbForesites can guide decision makers and/or stakeholders through key concepts, trends, and data that is relevant to your matter in the current moment and construct common conceptual frameworks to focus on a particular problem or problem set. Often limited in scope, these highly consequential and typically confidential sessions are intended to directly address specific concerns, identify root elements, diagnose causal clarity, and develop appropriate strategic solution(s) and/or remedial action(s).
Strategy Audit & Situational Analysis
Engage this “reality check” to leverage dbForesites powerful analytics and business intelligence to better understand your current strategic position(s) in today’s integrated global economy, environment and energy flux. Re-examine your recent history, reconsider your development path and re-plot your position(s) and/or course(s) in a comprehensive context within the relevant sweep of history and responsive to relevant trends.
"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there," Alice was advised once down the rabbit hole. dbForesites begins with the end in mind, but starts by meeting you where you are, building you a map and helping you find your best route(s) forward to your ultimate objectives.
Strategic Planning & Scenario Building
dbForesites’ strategic planning and scenario building begins by framing the relevant context, cross-checking understandings, objectifying assumptions, determining key drivers of change as well as critical needs and goals. By mapping potential outcomes over multiple pathways, our rigorous strategic planning processes produce resilient, high-return outputs and frameworks to guide future decision-making. Known for intense and inspiring internal working sessions, we thrive working iteratively and collaboratively with our client to build the most acutely responsive planning support possible.
Market Analysis & Current Conditions Assessment
dbForesites conducts comparative analysis, performs historic research, and examines market(s) and specific conditions necessary to build the objective, foundational understandings that can generate relevant, reliable insights into the current moment. When appropriate, dbForesites can dive deeply to develop custom research, conduct first-person interviews, and engage the community to ground stakeholder decision-making with fresh and direct intelligence.
Master Classes & Lectures
Typically non-specific presentations suitable for most audiences, these high-impact and inspirational sessions led by dbForesites Founder, Dan French, can cover a range of subjects. Delivered by one of the planet’s foremost thought leaders directing action on the front lines of business, each of these engaging presentations is packed with powerful ideas pushing the very edge of global actors today in energy, economy and environment.
dbForesites can also work with you to craft a customized curriculum best suited to briefing or coaching your stakeholders and/or team members with the most relevant themes, best practices, key learnings, macro concepts, current issues, and business stratagem to guide the most beneficial engagement. When appropriate, more collaborative and/or iterative approaches can make an immediate difference in your decision-making processes and give your team a lasting edge going forward.
Trend-Tracking, Forecasting & Future-Proofing
Amidst the swirling storm change and mishmash of megatrends sweeping across the geopolitical, economic, social, environmental and technological landscapes of planet Earth, which trends are dead ends, which will bend, and on which does the future depend? dbForesites deploys multiple systems, myriad analytical frameworks, proprietary technology and innovative techniques to develop comprehensive multi-factor forecasts rooted in objective reality and historical context. Factoring in the full spectrum of potential the 21st century presents, positive and negative, our powerful wide-angle perspective, deep analytics and sharp insight will help you distill the complexities of the contemporary global machine into workable frameworks, plans and forecasts.
Red Teams, Special Projects & Custom Reporting
Too often organizations take major decisions or deal with difference-making circumstances in a vacuum without subjecting their options to sufficiently rigorous scrutiny. The life of their company may be at stake, but they do not seek develop a robustly objective second opinion like they might a medical concern. To remedy this vital gap when the stakes are high, dbForesites assembles and leads “red teams” to triage even the most challenging circumstances by auditing assumptions, second-guessing logic, building counter-factuals, developing counterarguments and exploring alternative courses of action.
Our diverse multi-disciplinary red teams can deliver invaluable feedback to decision-points that will make the difference between success or failure. Armed with our own cutting-edge research, proprietary technology, and custom application of a variety of analytics, dbForesites is uniquely adept at linking quantitative and qualitative analysis with original insights that speak directly to each individual circumstance.
We will challenge your assumptions. We will dare you to think differently. We will help you see the field clearly, find the solution, build the big idea or break through the bottleneck. We will test the question/problem from multiple perspectives, play devil’s advocate and build alternative scenarios either to repair past mistakes or future proof forthcoming opportunities.
Our collaborative model, results-driven approach, cooperative spirit, and always forward-leaning perspective make us the ideal team to drop in to partner ad hoc with other teams. Depending on the scope of the project and/or the urgency of the need, dbForesites is able to deploy worldwide for onsite or offsite assignments.
Or dbForesites can bring its difference-making insight directly into the boardroom during engaging, intensive, and collaborative (confidential) working sessions to roll up the sleeves with you and develop specific ideas to address your burning strategic issues and most sensitive challenges.