Schwarms Pandisciplinary – All companies are creative
Three Questions
Translating Future Phenomena
Fostering Visionary Thinking
Creating Strategies for the Future
Translating Future Phenomena
Foresight researchers focus on empirically measurable “mega-trends” – and therefore primarily deal with the past. We identify and interpret future phenomena at an extremely early stage – by understanding and observing most creative and technological disciplines “from the inside.” We often translate relevant developments for our clients years before they are discussed as trends. Our clients use us as a catalyst for current challenges and the possible futures of their companies. We enjoy being challenged – in our thinking, in dialogue, and in our results.
Fostering Visionary Thinking
Years ago, MIT Journal asked: “Have companies forgotten how to think?” In our hectic, results-driven everyday lives, urgent matters usually take precedence over important ones. Existentially important development tasks are often outsourced to technology or design partners, consultants, or agencies. This can lead to interchangeable solutions that do not always fit the “soul” of a company or the DNA of a brand. We nurture and encourage internal expertise and creativity, bringing foresight back into the company.
Creating Strategies for the Future
We generally work for large or medium-sized companies. Our clients and partners appreciate us for our straightforward, engaging, and always productive collaboration. Our approach aims is to provide our partners with maximum support while delivering decisive concepts that they cannot obtain anywhere else at comparable level and speed. That sounds good – but what's the catch? We consciously chose to remain a small, completely owner-managed structure with a limited capacity to scale our services in terms of customized strategies and conceptual solutions.
From Trans- to Pandisciplinarity
At Schwarms, we interpret disciplinary expertise not as a limit, but as point of departure — one that’s free to dissolve, constructively, over the course of a project. Without losing its substance. And by integrating all the experience and skills that the people involved bring to the table beyond their basic expertise. This is what we call pandisciplinarity.
In addition to curiosity and empathy, it requires a mindset that no longer treats professional boundaries as fixed. “Transdisciplinary” work often stops short of that because our society is organized vertically: in politics, in business, in research, in education. Almost everything is divided into professional silos that collaborate — more or less effectively. Silos guard their own knowledge and shield themselves from outside influence. However, they are also almost “fully explored”: in the spirit of “diminishing returns”, every small step forward requires an even greater investment. Unless — we change perspective. And start looking for horizontal bridges. There are far too few of them. Which, in turn, is further proof that the greatest opportunities lie in between: between disciplines, between departments — spaces full of untapped potential that (to borrow from Pareto) can create immense impact with surprisingly little effort.
Curiosity helps – and so does anticipation
Futures is the plural of possibilities
Every entrepreneurial person sees opportunities. This is, so to speak, our ticket to active participation. But do we dare to go one step further? Where the term “opportunities” still gives us the opportunity to remain passive, the word “futures” puts us in charge: it emphasizes our creative freedom. Our active role. Our individual view of what is to come. Curiosity helps. So does anticipation.
Why wait?
Trigger your own tomorrow
Rethinking the company
“If you want to change something, you have to do something differently than before.” And “doing differently” in this old proverb is preceded by “thinking differently”. A genuine change of perspective usually requires an external perspective: a view that values the past but is committed and attuned to the future.
Rediscovering the company
A new course often leads us to reevaluate assets and capabilities that may have been taken for granted. Sometimes, it’s the quieter qualities — in new internal or external constellations — that create remarkable differentiation in the global market.
Making it incomparable
Isn’t it curious how many products and companies resemble each other? A phenomenon explained only by the immense effort that has gone into ongoing comparison and ever-closer adaptation. But it is 'incomparability' that creates uniqueness. And uniqueness sparks customer enthusiasm, motivates employees, and multiplies outcomes.
How we can collaborate?
Four proposals for collaboration
Blockchain Funghi
Decentralization as principle
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The Library
In the Schwarms' library, the Economist lies next to Spike magazine and a work by Merlin Sheldrake next to an object by Teenage Engineering ...
