General

How much foresight can you fit?

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Perhaps the biggest inhibitor of foresight for organizations is time. Even if your organization recognizes the power and value of exploring its future, the press of daily work and immediate needs squeezes away the time and energy you might give to exploring change.

You only have the time and resources you have. You have to find a way to fit in foresight. Below is advice based on how much time you expect to have. Certainly more is better, but you can optimize impact with some care and thought no matter the timing. As always, a savvy futurist can help to shape your efforts and help you guide them. And I am happy to chat about your situation whether or not you engage my help.

What to do if you only have….

An hour — you finally got time on leadership’s agenda, or it’s your turn for a brown bag lunch talk. You want to change minds, wake people to new ideas, energize thinking about the future, give foresight its due. This is hard!

Get right to it. Make it a conversation, seeded with distinct insights on change. Pose “what ifs” about what is central to the organization.

Have a conversation about the critical forces changing the organization’s destiny. That means surfacing everyone’s assumptions about the future, and helping them interpret the big changes that are at play in your business and your sector.

Do this: Prepare, prepare, prepare. An hour is not enough time for group discovery, which is valuable and powerful when there’s more time. It has to be a call to action around one or several (at most) critical changes you face that need focus. This hour should end with collective interest in more. If you have a hour with top leadership, it should lead to permission to deepen the exploration of the future in the organization, and more time.

A day — you have a little more time with a small group or a cross-functional team, and you have a mandate to explore something about the organization’s future.

Make the most of it! Make it quality time, preferably off site, to pare away distractions. Get everyone focused on exploring change and what it means to the organization. You have time to give participants a clear sense of coming change, and for them to take ownership of it, adding their ideas.

Do this: Do your homework beforehand. Develop a briefing or find a valid and meaningful, and short, body of ideas about the future of your interests, such as a list of critical forces or transformations in the sector. Use those as the basis for discussions. 

If you can, invite people from different responsibilities in the organization. Think like a revolutionary. Your goal is to seed ideas and interest in confronting change and deepening the team’s foresight.

Hold people off from immediately “solving” the problems implied. Try to get their energy first on elaborating on potential change and its implications. End with a call to further action.

A week — You’ve secured teh team’s time for a week of futures exploration. A week is time to learn and strategize with a select group of folks. That has power since those involved can discover and interpret critical ideas about change. They can learn to talk about them and prepare to be missionaries across the organization.

Do this: Identify the best team you can for open-minded exploratory thinking. If you can get a cross-functional group involved, do it.

Shape expectations in the wider organization for what you are doing. Find people and experiences that will help your team understand more about the future and how to think about it. Visits to places where you can see leading edge change, and hearing from diverse thinkers will open up your thinking.

Ultimately, it’s hands-on shaping of futures ideas, and a focus on postive visions of where the organization can go that will matter. Your team should play in the future, try out ideas, and then work to interpet what is possible, what is likely, and what is desirable in the future.

A month — You’ve gotten time for several iterations of futures thinking, and time for ideas to evolve and develop. A month is long enough to allow more development of ideas, time for reflection, and time to engage others beyond the core team. The time allows team memers to go off, do research, and expand your knowledgebase.

Do this: Plan to have two intensive sessions with a week or several between them. After orienting and launching the thinking, you can have team members commit to exploring and developign ideas for further discussion at a second session. 

You may have time as you start or in the middle of the month, to engage a wider group of stakeholders with a survey or other process for soliciting ideas. That has two payoffs. First, it engages others and helps encourage their interest. Second, it draws on more people’s insights and knowledge, empowering the core team.

A year — You have time and a budget for a much deeper exploration, engaging more internal an external stakeholders, and an iterative process of learning and discovery. This will be a full-blown futures initiative, a chance to explore and develop a comprehensive view of the future of and for your organization.

Do this: Establish and train a core team in foresight techniques,. Assigning them to complete a comprehensive exploration of the future shaping the organization’s interests. They will have time and should have resources for attending thought-leader conferences and futures-focused symposia. 

Among the programs to consider are workshops on the future that engage the thinking of folks across the organization. Building, illustrating, and publishing scenarios [TK links] that show alternate future contexts for the organization will create a tool for use with internal and external groups to further explore future possibililties.

This program year should include its own public relations. At least for internal groups, setting expectations for results, encouraging participation, and communicating emerging results will help ensure that the foresight effort leaves a legacy. Some organizations include in this a space, such as a “futures room” where images and words can be displayed, and where visitors can interact and add their own ideas, e.g. on a post-it wall. 

When you have built a view of the future, you should share it widely. Brief the chiefs, your board, and key stakeholders. Publish the thinking. Convene groups to make their own interpretation of the work, fitted to their interests.

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No matter the time you can secure and use, if you use it well, you will have a smarter, more foresightful organizatio.

The best time in history

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Bob Olson, Olson Carriage & Harness, Black Forest, CO"What was, do you think, the best time in human history?"

Bob Olson, Olson Carriage & Harness, teaches people skills from the past. He is an expert at horsemanship. He shows people how to teams of draft horses pulling a wagon, carriage, or sleigh. 

Bob lives and works on his ranch in Black Forest, Colorado. I met him when he made his team and 100-year-old covered wagon available for a short fiction film created by my son Robert Mahaffie. (Here is a link to Robert's film).

In our conversations, Bob and I ranged widely. And Bob was particularly challenging as we talked about the past, the future, the good and the bad in each. I knew Bob likes old things and the old ways of ranch life. He knew my work was about change, technology, and the future. But we both appreciated the others sensibilities. We spent no time on disagreement.

When we visited the Olson ranch, Bob threw a profound and impossible question at me: "John, what was the best time in history?"

He had just backed his team of Percheron draft horses, harnessed in a hay wagon, into the barn. He'd put the team, Vickie and Minnie, in their stalls and given them straw and water. Then he put the question to me, his big city visitor, my cell phone a tactile presence in my pocket. And the lack of service on the ranch having been established and lamented. 

In his quiet way, he waited to see what I had to say, a gentle smile played across his face.

I had no good answer, but maybe that's the point. After being flummoxed for a moment, I told Bob that figuring out how to think about his question was what mattered, not an answer. I think he agreed, and he didn't demand my answer.

And of course, the answer depends. As with any complex question, so much depends on definitions, contexts, and so on.

We agreed we couldn't really answer the question, but we also agreed, that the best time for humans might be prehistoric times. Back then, despite the hellish risks and suffering that might befall people, despite hunger and cold and thirst and conflict, and despite the fact that you might, if you were lucky, survive to be 30 years old, by the measures of the time, with a simplicity of expectation, you might be well satisfied.

Prehistoric peoples didn't need "mindfulness coaches". They didn't worry, I think we can presume, about their or their children's self-esteem. They didn't become paralyzed by uncertainty of whether to cut back on refined sugars and add more chia to their diets. And on and on.

I'll keep pondering Bob's question. I don't expect to answer it, but expect to gain from the pondering.

Thanks Bob! 

Image: Jane G. Mahaffie

Can irony change the world?

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On an October 2011 visit to a college dorm hallway in Colorado, we saw a spot where a water fountain had been removed, and the wall cavity patched with cinderblock. The dorm residents had put up a sign: “Occupy Water Fountain”. It was during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Also during the Fall of 2011, scattered across the Internet were pictures of funny (really funny) protest signs from the Occupy Wall Street protest and its affiliated protests across the US.

And each weeknight, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report hysterically slay hypocrisy and make fun of politicians.  I am a huge fan. This past few weeks, Stephen Colbert’s elaborate satirization of American campaign finance, notably the new mechanism of the SuperPAC, has intensified, gaining all kinds of attention, support, and condemnation.

Do irony or satire or humor have a place in changing our society for the better? I think there’s enormous power in them to do so, but I also think that there is risk that they take us off task, and actually weaken resolve. Satire, in effect, can diffuse or divert anger, even as it may educate more people about hypocrisy, injustice, and government foolishness.

I am concerned that the United States has become a mockutocracy–a place where mockery is the standard behavior and where it may often supplant the sequence of anger, organization, and action that we need to drive needed change. Does mockutocracy work?

The jury is still out. What is satire accomplishing in the current wave of events, including the problems in US electoral politics and the US Congress. It can feel good and entertain us, but does the satire just create an alternative to a political party–a club of cynics? The participants of that “party” participate mainly by endorsing the mocking, and expecting not much to change. Are many even motivated to vote and take other political action?

It’s not that the fans of satire don’t want things to change, but more that they succumb to the sense that the mockable will always be that way. That, I think is the risk. Can we learn to go more reliably from satire to political action? I think we must.

Simple triage to keep sane while scanning

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TriageIf you work at anticipating and understanding the future, you are in a permanent, 24/7, 365 day-a-year environmental scan. It's what you do, on the job or off. 

But that means endless opportunity to distract yourself, if you are doing a good, broad scan of lots of sources of information. That kind of scan, done right, means you are not sure what you are going to find as you work–you have to be "all over the map". It's what you're supposed to do..

So you have a problem: you find it hard to focus the scanning on your current needs and work–it's too open and exploratory. You can easily get lost, or use up time exploring, unsure if you should be doing that.

Don't try to narrow what you look at, you need the power and value of the view broad. But you also need a bring some discipline to your scanning efforts. 

Here is a triage approach you can use. Consider three categories of information, and how to handle them:

1. Short and of immediate use — things related to your current work. Read, process, share, etc. right now. Get the value from these sources as you discover them.

2. Park for later today or sometime soon, when you are not working on this particular task — things of near-at-hand use, such as on a different task or project than the one you are doing now. You might leave these on your bookmark bar.

3. Long read, extended viewing, etc. for my leisure time or reading time — things that you can tell are good to know, are informative or educational, but are more speculatively-linked to your work. Save links to these, download, print, bookmark, etc. There are lots of ways to do this, and you can find one that fits you. I use the Instapaper web app. I just click on "Read Later" and then go to my Instapaper collection, download them to an e-reader, and read them when I have time.

Your version of this approach can make a different to your productivity, and perhaps your sanity, as you work to be effective at scanning.

Image: Brian Gratwicke, via Flickr, creative commons attribution license

Environmental Scanning, Flickr, YouTube, and photo blogs

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youtube-flickr.jpgEnvironmental scanning is a technique in which almost anything goes. Scanning simply means exploring the universe of information available to discover deeper insights about what is going on and what is changing in the world. It’s the core technique of foresight, and there is no substitute. But too often, people’s environmental scanning is too narrow. One way it is narrow is in depending mostly on the written word: traditionally print news sources, and more recently, electronic sources that are word based. What’s missing is the rich and evocative potential of images. Since people working in foresight cannot go everywhere and be everwhere, it’s powerful and important to open up an additional channel in environmental scanning that gives at least a flavor of change around the world, in different cultures, in different sectors, and in different social circles. Fortunately, there is a world of "eyes" out there, capturing pictures and videos that we can look at, think about, and use to help others think new thoughts. You can consider working to add the visual to your foresight efforts. For example:

  • Add image sources to your environmental scanning. There are dozens of "daily photo blogs" on different themes and, particularly, from different places. The authors monitor, among others, daily photo blogs from Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City, Russia, Accra, and Sao Paulo. Adding the images to your regular scanning adds deeper insight on what is happening around the world.
  • Use more pictures in your presentations–you might even try a presentation that is all images. Most people will benefit, and some who are visual learners will much more reliably understand what you are trying to convey. Flickr is a great images source–you can’t go see everything yourself, but there are pictures from all over the world on Flickr. You can also sometimes get a sense of how others look at the world through what the people sharing images on Flickr show and say about their pictures. 
  • Carry a small digital camera whereever you go, or use your cell phone camera, and try to see signs of change. Some of the images will evoke a lot of ideas for you, and you can use them in your work and in conveying things to others.
  • Explore YouTube. You might take a regular look at the top videos there. Whether artful, amateurish, meaningful or ridiculous, the top videos meant a lot to a lot of people, and are worth at least a glance.

It may be that for those of us exploring the future, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words. Anything that helps us think more deeply is especially valuable to our efforts, and "going visual" will yield better foresight.

Update: Please see also this special page on environmental scanning.

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