Often business is accused of being short-term and tunnel-visioned in its thinking. But in 2000, the Australian Business Foundation with the help of futurists, Global Business Network Australia, embarked on a scenario-building study looking at alternative business futures for Australia and asked the "what if" questions.

The Australian Business Foundation is an independent business research think-tank, founded and principally sponsored by the eminent industry organisation, Australian Business Limited, which itself pre-dates Australia's Federation by fifteen years as the Chamber of Manufactures of NSW.

Motivated by a desire to 'get ahead of the game' and concerned by Australia's declining position on world competitiveness benchmarks, Australian Business Limited created the Australian Business Foundation as a separate entity with a single mission. This is to conduct groundbreaking research that advances knowledge and fosters new thinking and best practice on Australia's business competitiveness, prosperity and jobs.

With this pedigree and purpose, and now backed also by prestigious corporate sponsors like Baker & McKenzie, it is not surprising that we explored the potential futures likely to confront Australian businesses, documented in the publication entitled "Alternative Futures: Scenarios for Business in Australia to the Year 2015".

My task today is to share with you the essentials of the four alternative scenarios of the future we discerned, with the help of the colourful prose and short video scripts of Richard Neville. And to use these to provoke your reflection on how these scenarios are relevant to your business.

How robust or at risk are your business strategies if the future panned out in any one of these directions? Can you identify responses that would be productive across more than one of these future scenarios for your enterprise? Where are the disruptive challenges most likely to come from? And what might be the best source of as yet unimagined opportunities and markets for your enterprise?

Let me first tell you how we arrived at our four scenarios.

We undertook a process that involved: desk research and literature reviews; media monitoring and opinion sampling; interviews, analysis and commentary from many businesses, social and educational specialists here and overseas; three scenario building workshops involving over 40 individuals from diverse walks of life; and focus groups and consultations to "road test" emerging scenarios, including with school children and tomorrow's political leaders.

As a result, we discerned the following major forces shaping the future:

• increasing globalisation and its effects on national boundaries, cultural identity, political decisions, and on the speed and ease of business imitations;
• the unprecedented transformations being wrought on business and commerce by online, open, networking technologies;
• the power of the new consumerism, with production decisions shifting increasingly from producers and owners of capital to consumers;
• the rise of the knowledge economy and the ascendancy of intangibles, where what you know is more important than what you own;
• the far-reaching effects of new technology advances and the convergence and recombination of old technologies in everything from bioscience to broadcasting;
• new skills and competencies required to compete in an increasingly wired, informed and connected world; and
• the likely impacts on social cohesion of the way the world is moving, whether it's the gap between the information rich and the information poor, or the increasing mainstream concern with environmental issues and the social record of businesses.

Now, let's visit the four future scenarios.

First Global Nation – characterised by the globalisation of business and the wired, interconnected, online economy, where Australia successfully finds itself a place.

Australia shows leadership in this "silicon valley" world of knowledge industries, global peace, open markets and economic growth. A vital young country reinvents itself to capitalize on the massive transformations of business and society.

Our internet-savvy firms sparkle on Wall Street, our skills are sought after and we manage to retain value at home from the plethora of new, nimble Aussie firms playing globally.

Sound the Retreat – the story of the backlash and consequent decay of globalisation, forcing Australia to revalue its bilateral business relationships as multilateral ones become impossible in the face of trade barriers, global wars and skirmishes, capital and immigration controls and nationalist and protectionist policies of all sorts.

There is economic downturn, a widespread capital retreat and loss of investor confidence. Some manage to forge commercial partnerships with key nations and drawing on our melting-pot past, create a cultural and business gateway.

Brave Old World – where Australia rests on its laurels of strong economic performance and sound social protections and does not see the need or the urgency to pursue the emerging opportunities of the globalised knowledge economy in any systematic fashion.

Over-reliant on tourism and glamorous yet scant biotech breakthroughs, we miss the global tide. Introspective and smug, the lopping of tall poppies continues, fed by a "she'll be right" complacency. The economy falters, our skills erode, few new start-ups or emergent technologies survive here, and major brands are lost offshore.

Green is Gold – eco catastrophes, feasible clean technologies, and more environmental information and activism brings environmental sustainability to the fore.

Environment issues become mainstream bottom line business concerns and Australia gets caught up in the strengthening of international environmental regulations and agreements, with varying consequences for business.

After hard times for Australia so reliant on fossil fuels, some businesses capitalise on their global environmental management acumen and open up opportunities for Australia.

How plausible these scenarios are is a matter of judgement, but some recent developments suggest that the Australian Business Foundation's work is on the right track:

•  The meltdown of World Trade Organisation negotiations and the activities of anti-globalisation protestors are straight from the pages of Sound the Retreat, as sadly, are the terrorist attacks in the USA and Bali – even if reality was more extreme than we imagined.
• New markets in "green" electricity trading and growing public concern about genetically modified foods suggest a mindset that points to the Green is Gold scenario. See also the Business Council and the Institute of Company Directors taking an interest in triple bottom line concepts and corporate/community partnerships.
• Despite the tech wreck, First Global Nation is still alive and well because of the transforming effect of IT and online technologies on business productivity, skills and innovation. Witness new Australian companies riding the technology, internet and e-commerce wave – like the cluster of photonics companies in Redfern, the IT and biomedical crescent around North Ryde, and Aussie film and multimedia enterprises winning Academy Awards.

And sources as authoritative as the IMF and the OECD talk about the "Australian economic miracle" and have placed Australia higher up the order of economic rankings, a necessary pre-condition for Brave Old World complacency. The upside of this are suggestions that Australian's direct, anti-authoritarian and laid back style might actually be culturally appropriate business behaviour in a world where being inventive and good at collaboration is a competitive advantage.

If there is a key message from the Australian Business Foundation's futures thinking then it is that we are in a new game. Old strategies that have been effective in the past will be less so in the future. This means new approaches by firms to their business strategy.

In essence, everything should be aimed at "future-proofing" the business by:

•  reinventing new business opportunities and new possibilities for creating value for customers;
• understanding and securing a place in new, high growth markets or in areas currently not well served, but especially where new online technologies can create openings;
• investing in vital new skills and technologies, particularly mastery of the art of knowledge management and collaboration and strategic alliances with messy webs of intersecting partners and stakeholders that form a disband as needed; and
• operating productively and cleverly with a global focus and with sensitivity to the impacts of operations on the environment and on the social concerns of communities and stakeholders.

When it comes to applying future scenarios to particular enterprises, I am reminded of the saying that the best way to predict the future is to create it.