Postcard from Futures: the method for cultivating AI mindset in organizations

The importance of skills upgrading in AI transformation

The diffusion of artificial intelligence technologies within organizations makes it necessary to upgrade skills, both technical for those specifically involved in areas contiguous to IT, and soft, for all people who increasingly find themselves using AI-enhanced productivity and creativity tools. Indeed, applications that integrate artificial intelligence require a specific mindset and skills, similar to what had happened with the introduction of digital tools into the enterprise (from email to the cloud).

The path of AI transformation, or the adoption within organizations of artificial intelligence tools, thus involves the design of both new services and platforms and policies and training programs to guide their adoption and use.

An innovative method for developing soft skills and AI mindset

Postcard from Futures is an innovative method developed by Orbyta Tech to cultivate AI mindset development and thus facilitate AI adoption in the enterprise. It stems from the integration of coaching and Futures Thinking methods that act to develop soft skills that are increasingly relevant in today’s work landscape: vision, creativity, critical thinking, lateral thinking, and a responsible and active approach to growth.

The method is highly flexible and, in addition to being a workshop specifically aimed at AI mindset development within AI transformation processes, it can also be declined within team building activities, career coaching paths or, in combination with Design Thinking methods, for co-design activities aimed at AI-based solution designs.

Workshop to develop AI mindset and prompting skills

Team building to cultivate imagination, lateral thinking and creativity

Career coaching to increase awareness about one's path and alignment with company vision

Conception of use cases and co-design of digital solutions

Postcard From Futures: visioning techniques and creativity augmented by AI

At the heart of Postcard From Futures is the creative process that leads, professionals and teams alike, to the development of stories from the future that are then represented visually with the support of generative AI tools.

The creative process is developed in two stages:

1) Imagining a Scenario through visioning techniques: people develop a eutopian, i.e., positive and realizable, future scenario as an alternative to the dystopian scenario typical of science fiction pop imagery. The activity is based on the visioning technique derived from the disciplines of career coaching and Futures Thinking that helps individuals and organizations imagine and design a desired future.

2) Scenario Visualization with Generative AI: After building the positive future scenario, people use the Midjourney generative AI tool to create a visual representation and give more concreteness to the power of imagination and metaphorical language.

Therefore, different communication media, both analog and digital, are used during the creative process to enable the involvement of people with different prior experiences by creating a common communication territory.

What skills you can develop with Postcard From Futures

The Postcard from Future method enables the development of different skills useful in the work context and for different purposes: from vision development to AI-enhanced creativity.

Visioning for leadership and teams

Using imagination techniques integrated within career and team coaching pathways, it is possible to develop storytelling that communicates distinctive visions for:

leadership: enables the establishment of a personal vision oriented toward a positive and concretely achievable future through the development of an action plan
team: stimulates collaboration around the vision and values of the organization or team to enable strategic alignment and the development of a sense of ownership.

AI-powered creativity

Through the use of GenAI tools, it is possible to develop:

mindset: insight into the characteristics ofgenerative AI as a probabilistic technology and understanding the implications related to lack of control and responsible AI (identification of inherent bias )

peer to peer learning: development of learning methods based on trial-and-error and creative interaction within the community to foster continuous learning

prompting: learning creative techniques through the use of text-to-image tools such as Midjourney. Participants learn how to create effective prompts and customize visual styles to create impactful narrative and visual content.

Frequently asked questions about AI transformation

AI transformation is the process of integrating artificial intelligence to streamline processes, automate decisions, and create personalized experiences, making companies more efficient and competitive. This process is part of the broader digital transformation, which integrates digital technologies into every aspect of the business, transforming business models, operations and customer interactions. Adopting a combined AI and digital transformation strategy enables companies to innovate faster, improve productivity, and successfully address digital market challenges by leveraging data, automation, and artificial intelligence to drive change.

Mindset is the set of beliefs and attitudes that influence the way we think and deal with challenges, distinguishing between fixed mindset (static mindset) and growth mindset (growth mindset), which is fundamental to personal and professional success. The digital mindset, on the other hand, is the mental attitude that enables us to adapt to the digital world, based on adaptability, curiosity, agility and collaboration. Developing it means being open to change, continually learning new technologies and improving digital problem-solving, which is useful in every field, not just technology. A key development is the AI mindset, or the ability to understand and integrate artificial intelligence into one’s operations, leveraging it to increase efficiency, automation and decision-making capabilities. In companies, a digital and AI mindset accelerates digital transformation, fostering innovation and competitiveness.

GenAI is an abbreviation for “Generative AI.” It refers to a type of artificial intelligence designed to create new content, such as text, images, music or video, from existing data, relying on deep learning models. These models are trained on huge amounts of information and can generate original results that mimic or are inspired by the input data.