Foresight in the organization

What is and What if

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In organizations, knowing what’s going on today across the business landscape (”what is”), is essential. Too often the press of daily work keeps an executive from knowing enough.

But understanding how things are changing and the emerging challenges and opportunities in front of you (”what if”) needs attention too. Nearly always, the press of business and immediate demands shut down attention to “what if”.

Here is what is involved:  

“What is” — the operating environment:

  • Due diligence — care and attention to the organization’s interests
  • Industry focus — sector and market knowlege
  • The state of the art — best practices and the latest technology, systems, processes
  • What’s going on — the competitive landscape

“What if” — the future:

  • Leading edge change — emerging change in the market, technology, society, that will impact the organization
  • Emerging and future possibilities — identification of specific opportunities and challenges and potential responses to them

For both, we can’t help but stand in today as we think and work to understand. But we must try to think forward to better anticipate the future.

“What is” functions poorly without “what if.” Taking action in response to conditions today, without thoughts toward the future, is risky. But the reverse is true too. You need to know enough about current conditions to fully explore potential change. 

What to do about it

Broaden your view of “what is” by exploring the environment more broadly, beyond the specific marketplace niche, or issue, or geography you focus on.

Deepen your view of “what if” into the future by: Explicitly testing out ideas about 5 or 10 or more years from now. Ask the “what ifs” questions. Build stories (scenarios) of future possibilities. Draw implications of those “what ifs”.  Attention to both questions will make you stronger and more limber as you face challenges and meet new opportunities.

For more insight on this and a related illustration, see: Management, strategy, and foresight, compared

Do you suffer from mill-mindedness?

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The Mill astride the river was the town’s heart. Life blood pumped through it in surges of steam, blasts of the shift-change whistle, toings and froings of boxcars and hoppers on the rail spur, shift workers parading in and parading out. Tied up the traffic light? A mill shift was entering or leaving. A man asking credit at the grocery? The Mill cut back hours. New houses going up on the North side? Output and sales are up. Like peasant shacks against a castle wall, the whole town leaned on The Mill, and drew its sustenance from it. Imagine the town without The Mill? You cannot.

You must try to imagine the town without The Mill.

Small towns exist because of a mill or rail depot, a mine, a factory, a college, a hospital, something central that informs, shapes, sustains a community. But America’s ghost towns are often mill or mine towns that lost their mainstays. They didn’t think past The Mill.

Too many companies and sectors have something just like this: a mill, a production line, a critical machine, a cash cow, that is everything. It occupies the front and center of the minds of stakeholders: owners, investors, leaders, and workers. Wall Street sees the firm with mill eyes. Lenders see it with mill eyes. The community sees the firm and itself it with mill eyes.

All of them want The Mill to be The Mill, to churn along, to make money and jobs and community. And all of them define their truths in reference to it. This is mill-mindedness and it can constrain thought and change.

Using foresight to fight mill-mindedness

Foresight can make the difference. Images of different futures are powerful for fighting mill-mindedness.

What is the company (or the town), after The Mill?

Good futures thinking brings a focus beyond what exists now. It can break down rigid mental framing. Without images of something different, The Mill will define everything, past, present, and future.

How to work past mill-mindedness:

Ask these questions of yourself or better, discuss them with colleagues:

  1. What is our mill—that central thing or process that we allow to define us?
  2. Does that thing or process have a secure future?
  3. What would our organization become if we no longer had it?

Exploring the answers means confronting fundamental questions about how you frame and understand what your organization is all about. And answering them sets you up to consider “what’s next?”.

So build scenarios of your future without The Mill. Re-imagine the organization on a new basis. Those thought experiments allow you to see a future that doesn’t depend on this singular force or asset. It gets you past your mill-mindedness.

This blog has dozens of posts about “thinking differently” and on the power of foresight to work past stuck thinking. See: Thinking differently 

My practice as a futurist is centered on helping organizations break down barriers to thought and positive change. If your organization is so afflicted, maybe I can help. Let me know. Email me or call 202-271-0444.

Image: White Oak Cotton Mill, North Carolina, about 1914, with part of the mill village in the foreground. Public domain.

What keeps organizations stuck in the present?

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What keeps an organization stuck in the present (or struggling to get out of the past)?:

  • Holding on to sunk investment — Organizations hold tight to the big systems and assets they have invested in, often limiting their ability to move elsewhere, but also framing their thinking about what they can and should do.
  • Tradition — For example, social organizations such as the Boy Scouts or Freemasons have deep-set traditions that factor in their ability to even conceive of change. 
  • Inability to change the business model — Corporations and nonprofits face limits on their ability to evolve or jump to a new revenue or business model, for example to scale up or down their revenues, sales or donor volume, etc.
  • Defined by others — For example, the United States Air Force struggles to take up roles in cybersecurity. It is defined historically and in the public eye by its role for 70 years operating military aircraft. Similarly, organizations are often defined by Wall Street. A blue chip firm isn’t supposed to suddenly act like a start up, plunging into a new marketplace, or taking its operations and investment in a new direction.
  • Market drifting away — For example, cable outlets such as ESPN may have a steady-state view of their markets and an interest in continuing to push for market share and viewership, even as entertainment viewing has moved to mobile devices, non-real-time viewing
  • Fear of change/inability to imagine positive change — Not having a positive vision of what’s ahead, or at least a sense of taking intentional action to try for a positive future leaves organizations locked in current, often defensive behavior.
  • Pollyannism — Excessive optimism — the habit of thinking things will come around or that there are no threats that really matter. A simple human tendency or temperament, this can also be an affliction of whole organizations.

What to do about it — How to get un-stuck

1. Inventory how your organization is stuck. Pull together a few colleagues who you think are ready to think differently. Together, inventory the way your organization is “stuck”. Consider each of the items above. Which applies to your organization. How?

2. Identify critical forces of change. Make the case for change. Decide what those critical forces mean. Do they compel you to make changes? What is stopping you?

3. Pose sobering, critical “what ifs” for the organization. These should be powerful changes that would require the organization to change. What do they imply you need to do differently?

4. Get beyond key biases. Tell each other what they are. List them. What are they rooted in? See more here.

5.http://Setting aside biases Armed with these self-assessments, open up the conversation about needed change. Go at it. Don’t backslide!

Other prior posts with some good insights on this:

Image: Han Solo in Carbonite, William Warby, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution license

Management, strategy, and foresight compared

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This post distinguishes management, strategic planning and foresight. It suggests how the “long view” and global perspective of futurists, which is at the core of foresight, also benefits management and strategic planning.

Here are some definitions:

  • Management—design and orchestration of processes to maintain an organization’s operations and achieve its defined objectives. Near-term, generally focused on the present, and centered on the organization and its current operating environment.
  • Strategic planning—identifying and prioritizing goals and objectives for an organization’s near-term future, generally 3 to 5 years. Focused on the existing organization, it considers, or should consider, external environment impacts and change.
  • Foresight—long-range exploration of change, generally 10 years plus, and interpretation of possible futures for their organizational implications. It takes a broad, often global/contextual view of external forces shaping the future, and looks deep into the future to identify unmet challenges and emerging opportunities.

Managers are understandably focused on the present and on day-to-day management. The best are fine-tuning their processes and systems as they run. Others are playing catch up, implementing changes to put things right and catch up to existing demands. In either case, the work they are doing is management. 

Managers have an instinctive action mindset. Their framing is on the organization and its sector and marketplace. That close-focus holds thinking in organizations in the present and the near at hand. It constrains exploration of more impactful change. The risk is an organization with blinders on, one that engages in a steady pattern of fire, ready, aim. 

Strategic planning arises from this close-focus and near-term context. It works inside the habits of business managers, and usually falls short of engaging long-term thinking about new challenges and possibilities.

The solution is to separate execution from exploration. True leadership means pressing for a long view to discover more potential change and opportunity even as they maintain operations. With that stretch thinking comes a promise to “bring it home to today” which reassures stakeholders that the exploration is relevant and valuable.

 

8 things leaders should know about strategic foresight

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Today’s leaders are pressed to focus on strategic foresight and many are responding. But it’s not always clear what strategic foresight means. What do leaders need to know?

  1. It has to be long term. For true clarity on your future, you need a view that goes at least five or ten years out. You need to see past immediate concerns and explore and envision real change. See: The short-term view and the long-term view
  2. There are no “answers.” The future is uncertain, with a range of potential outcomes. So strategic foresight doesn’t mean prediction, it means clarifying patterns of change and modeling potential outcomes and choices. See: Foresight illustrated: The mother of all futures diagrams
  3. You have to look beyond your usual domain. New challenges and undiscovered opportunities will often come from outside your sector or market. See: All futures are global
  4. You need to reach beyond the low-hanging fruit. The actions you can take now to fix things and keep going are obvious, whether or not you are able to accomplish them. They are the low-hanging fruit. Addressing bigger challenges and opportunities, and forging a successful future, means reaching beyond the low-hanging fruit to bigger systems that will need to change. See: Making change beyond the low-hanging fruit
  5. The foresight process itself is valuable. Wider participation in the processes of strategic foresight strengthens organizational foresight, agility, and learning. You need others’ inputs, and you need others to be a part of innovation and decisionmaking. And everyone benefits from the time spent learning, exploring, and imagining. See: Noun=bad, verb=good and Planning, scanning, forecasting—it’s the verb not the noun
  6. You must confront unpleasant truths, not just hopes and dreams. That means “what ifs” that include catastrophic or transformational change. From those scenarios can come fresh thinking about a positive path forward. See: The unspoken scenario
  7. Success means forging a culture of foresight. Strategic foresight can’t be a once-in-a-while activity. Organizational habits of mind and action should stand on a base of clear and regular thinking about the future. See: What is a foresight culture? and The characteristics of a foresightful organization
  8. The future is yours to shape. Finally, the future is not inevitable. You can and must shape it yourself. Don’t wait for it to happen to you. See: Don’t be a victim of change

My work is all about helping leaders do these things. Let me know if I can shed more light on this, or help you kick your efforts up to a new level. Jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz and 202-271-0444 More about my work is at www.leadingfuturists.biz.

Inhibitors of foresight: Measurement and its pitfalls

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“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”   –William Bruce Cameron, sociologist (often attributed to Einstein)

We put a lot on measurement. We say, “what gets measured gets done.” What we can measure takes priority over the subjective and unmeasured.

We expect proof of progress that we can measure. Numbers that we can report or publish prove success. Statistical reports and year-on-year comparisons dominate leadership meetings.

But measurement weakens or fails when we’re dealing with the future. The future does not exist. There is no data. There is nothing we can touch or feel or measure.

Consider:

1. You can’t measure something that hasn’t happened
The results of a policy, program change, or new business model unfold over time. Any measurable outcome is in the future. We need to start the change process now, ahead of any chance at measured assessment. Yet often managers look for immediate quantitative evidence of success.

EXAMPLE: RotoRooter placed radio ads in my city in the 1970s. Then I didn’t hear any ads for 20+ years. But they had planted an idea (and a jingle) in my head that I used thirty years later when I had a blocked drain. RotoRooter could not have measured that payoff of the ads in the 1970s.

2. New or emerging things are hard to measure and our traditional measurement tools don’t fit
New things need new measures. But we don’t always know what those should be. Or, we may think the measurement tools we have fit when they don’t. Our measurement can give results that lead to wrong assessments and decisions.

EXAMPLE: When a consumer sees a promotional Instagram post, some kind of brand message has gotten across. But such social media marketing is new. What’s the value of that Instagram post to the brand owner? Is it the equal of a TV or print ad? We have numerical measurement tools for those: circulation, impressions, and reach. Do those work for social media messages? We don’t know enough to say. But instinct tells us to use the social media anyway. Our instinct is surely right.

3. We can’t measure some things that matter
Some of the most interesting changes in society and commerce are those that are hard or impossible to measure. Social phenomena, psychic outcomes, and culture and behavior change don’t fit our measurement tools.

EXAMPLE: In education, we don’t know all the payoffs from experiential learning, from collaboration, or from the application of new technology. Common standardized testing doesn’t directly assess those programs. The intellectual outcomes for a child won’t be clear or measured until years later. But mandated standardized testing has to correlate specific parts of curricula to measured assessments, today.

What to do about this

In strategic conversation, consider changes that you won’t be able to assess quantitatively. Allow strategic action that has weak or no measures. Get beyond the tyranny of measurement. To do otherwise is to hamstring organizations and limit positive change.

Image: G. Combe, Elements of Phrenology, 1824, via Wikimedia Commons.

Don’t be a victim of change

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When you face change, your responses fall on a spectrum. Foresight makes sure you are in the right place.

Reactive — Watching and likely being blindsided by change, and only making a move when forced to do so. Often your action is expensive and not effective. You miss opportunities and risk failure and economic loss.

Responsive — Preparing for and responding to emerging, visible change. You gain agility for responding, and may get ahead of crises and seize opportunities.

Proactive — Anticipating and shaping change. You are ready for crises and sharp change. You can seize opportunities ahead of others.

Never be a victim of change. Anticipate and shape it. Foresight is decisive in making you ready.

7 Deadly sins of foresight

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1. Ignoring the future (You let today's concerns give you an excuse to not focus on the future) [See: Keep an eye on the future while righting the ship].

2. Shortsightedness (You only think a few years into the future) [See: The foresight gap: what too many organizations get wrong]

3. Mistaking the present for the future (You mistake fixing things and catching up with today for being future-focused) [See: If you're only keeping up you're probably going backwards]

4. Narrowness (You fail to realize your future will be shaped by a much larger one which you need to understand) [See: Foresight illustrated: choosing how broad a view to take while exploring the future]

5. All else held equal (You let your attention focus on just one change, and assume everything else stays the same) [A solution is to use scenarios– fleshed out views of the future — to make sure you explore how multiple changes will unfold. See: Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future] 

6. Lack of vision (You have not thought through nor communicated the future you want or expect) [See: You can't be what you can't see]

7. Deafness (You don't listen to others, or pay attention to signals of change) [See: Talk to the frog]

For more on pitfalls and "deadly sins" for foresight see: 13 mistakes you make when exploring the future

For good habits in foresight that can fight these sins, see:  27 habits of highly effective futurists

Image: detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The seven deadly sins and the four last things, circa 1500. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.

The five people you meet in bringing futures into an organization

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Getting an organization to pay attention to the future is hard. There are people you meet along the way that help and others that throw obstacles in your path. Here are the five people you’re likely to meet along the way:

1. The Booster

The Booster lets you follow the path you’ve mapped out. Once you’re on it, they back you 100%. Boosters can be future-oriented themselves. They know what questions they have about the future and why the answers will be valuable. They clear a path for you to let you guide the exploration. They are your advocate and sometimes your collaborator in the work.

LESSON: Work as closely as you can with the Booster to align with their specific interests and goals. Answering their questions about the future gives you license to communicate any other insights, even sobering ones, about the future. Be prepared for this client’s own sophistication and knowledge about the future. Do your homework for a more fruitful relationship.

2. The Enthusiast

The Enthusiast is a gee-whiz fan of futures ideas. They thrill at the ideas that bubble up when you explore what's possible. They are impatient to break past near-term thinking. They have a reputation in their organization for having “out there” ideas. Your relationship with the Enthusiast can be fun and fruitful, but it also has traps.

LESSON: The Enthusiast may have a narrow interest in the futures cool factor, and much less interest in careful efforts to map and interpret change. Understand that you are, at times, a tool for the Enthusiast’s goal of shaking things up, and only that. Try to build interest in a more comprehensive view forward based on their enthusiasm. Their gut interest in new things can spark a passion for strategic foresight.

3. The Organization Man

The Organization Man is for exploring the future but fiddles with the process. The Organization Man believes in what you are doing, but fears others won’t. They bring up organizational norms and rules, and to look for conventional ways to measure outcomes that fit their organization’s usual business processes. They will pressure you to make things palatable to the organization and take out scary or sobering conclusions.

LESSON: The Organization Man needs reassurance. Understand their organization as well as you can. Be ready to ease concerns or even respond in the ways they crave. They may struggle to find a “safe” fit with something new and strange—futures. Though you may feel constrained by their worrying, they are doing you a favor; you can learn how to do a better job delivering insights to an inward-focused organization.

4. The Skeptic

The Skeptic is predisposed to fear or at least not have faith in the foresight process. They may say that it won’t work, or people won’t go for it. They may think it’s a waste of time. Often the skeptic will say, “We tried that in the 1990s, and it didn’t work.” If you are lucky, you’ll face a person who is Skeptic but still is willing to engage new ideas anyway.

LESSON: Be ready for cynics/skeptics. What can you do to respond? Work to get them to arrive at their own new insights. Work to build readiness for ideas about change. Be patient. Show the reasons, the power of new ideas about change. Winning over the skeptic can give you a strong advocate and will make your work stronger, clearer, and more compelling.

5. Big Foot

Big Foot will not allow an “out of control” process like futures to be as free as it should, if they allow it at all. “Big foot” is far more interested in order than discovery. Big Foot’s tendency is to subvert all parts of the process that lead toward unknown outcomes. They are not sold on the process to begin with. They may even be acting to unsure deniability if the process upsets anybody.

LESSON: Organizations want to protect what exists and avoid risk. Big Foot takes that to heart. You need to decide if you can work with this counterforce. Some potential clients are prewired for a bad fit. You are best off if you can find a true advocate that can endorse and guide the process, and get clear of Big Foot.

________

Do you see yourself in one of the five types? If so, I hope you’re a Booster or Enthusiast. Even then, you may need to give yourself some coaching, to be sure you are not in the way of the process of getting folks to explore the future.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to the people I’ve worked with over the past thirty years. Whether I liked how it happened or not you showed me what it means to introduce long-term thinking in organizations.

And of course I based my title on Mitch Albom’s novel: the Five People You Meet in Heaven. Thanks for the inspiration. 

Constrained foresight and what to do about it

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How often is foresight (or the lack of it) the weakest link in an organization?

There are always constraints that limit an organization’s progress. Eliyahu M. Goldratt brought this idea to management science in his “Theory of Constraints”. And one constraint is the “weakest link” for an organization. The bottleneck created when packaging equipment runs more slowly than the production line is a common example.

Constrained foresight is a bottleneck
Often the constraint is embodied in the organization's policies and paradigms (see: LINK). Engrained beliefs or habits restrict fresh thinking and thwart change. Foresight may be the victom.

What limits foresight? Low tolerance for talk about the future, a lack of awareness of its value, and insufficient time spent constrain foresight. People in organizations are busy and stressed. Leaders rarely reward people for breaking away from their “real work” to explore change.

Insufficient foresight harms an organization’s ability to change, its capacity for product/service/brand innovation, and the quality of its strategymaking. The organization flies blind into the future. 

Five things you can do about it: 

1. Acknowledge the value and unmet need for foresight. This means building a constituency for futures discussions and for including views 5 or 10 years out in strategic discussions.

2. Find forward-thinking people in the organization that can connect with each other, collaborate, and extend thinking into the future. They can meet ad hoc, or better, regularly for futures discussions.

3. Add futures thinking to your diet. Others are doing valuable work for you, free. Follow bloggers and news feeds that curate and interpret trends and discover leading edge change. And pay it forward—share what you find with your colleagues, and tell them why it’s important.

4. Harness the tools of foresight: environmental scanning and trend analysis and scenario planning, especially.

5. Convene cross-functional groups to assess the organization’s systems for their futures-readiness. An outside futurist can bring the tools and instincts you need to make sure these discussions keep to a longer view. (Call me! 202-271-0444 and jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz)

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