It is true, and even some futurists forget, that not all change is radical or fast or even noticeable. Sometimes change will be entirely predictable. But we also know that sometimes, indeed, it will be radical, fast, and very noticeable, and the difference between those two states, and in the choatic interstice between them, is the story of companies, nations, and peoples.

Building and nurturing organizations that are sensitive to both sorts of change (and what happens between them) is arguably the most important task a leader has. It is, of course, made vastly more complicated, difficult, and downright confounding when we face up to the prickly fact that change often comes from places we don’t anticipate (or…if it does, its manifestation isn’t at all what we supposed).

A useful exercise for any group (although individuals can reap some benefits from it as well) is a mental stretch called ‘coffeehouse’. A little background: although known in Turkey and elsewhere for a couple of hundred years previously, it wasn’t until the mid-17C that England got its first coffeehouse of any note. A hundred years later there were well over 500 of them in London itself. The story isn’t the near Starbuckian spread of nouveau coffee proprietors and their dens of caffeinated city folk), but rather the change catalyzed by their very existence. For instance, the coffeehouse sits at the beginning of – among other things – the insurance business, the stock market, and the encyclopedia. In addition, of course, coffeehouses also offered one of the greatest bastions of democratic assembly in the early modern period, something that would on to quite literally transfigure the world.

So, ‘coffeehouse’ is an exercise in exploring possible unintended consequences and then bringing into focus ways in which your individual enterprise might be affected by this change. Here’s how it works: gather a group (4-6 is ideal) and postulate an absolutely far reaching and hardly imaginable change in an industry completely separate from yours (if you’re in paper think farming, in farming think fashion). Map out together the possible effects, drawing closer and closer to those that would impact your stakeholder’s stakeholders, then your stakeholders, and finally you. Ultimately, as you’ll see, you’re collectively exploring an answer to what almost might be called The Question: how does change, that I can’t even see, affect everything I do, every day?

There are many, many coffeehouses out there, and a regular effort to explore ways of thinking about them – even if you’re not addressing the particular one you’ll see next – incorporates a central tenant of both futures thinking and risk management: change is inevitable, your response is not.