strategy and leadership

Using foresight to expand your strike zone

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Your organization is good at something, or tries to be. It works for opportunities in a certain part of the marketplace. That part of the whole is the organization’s “strike zone.”

But that zone may be too limited for your ongoing success, especially as change unfolds around you. Areas outside that zone have potential too. They may be where the best opportunities are.

This, of course, is a baseball metaphor. And we can take it a little further.

Where’s the best “pitch” to hit? Is it in the zone of opportunities you already pursue? Can you, and should you, expand that zone? 

Ted Williams was sort of wrong

Baseball great Ted Williams wrote a book called The Science of Hitting (1970). He had been a phenomenal ball player who by 1970 was managing the Washington Senators.

In his book, he explained how to maximize success by knowing what pitches to hit. And the ideal pitches are specific to the batter.

There is wisdom in what he wrote. And smart organizational leaders follow a similar line. Even Warren Buffett, is a fan of Williams’ book and approach. Go for what you can hit well.

But organizations too often follow this to a fault. “Stick to our core business” they say. (That’s their “happy zone” in Ted Williams’ phrasing). “Don’t chase low-odds opportunities.”

Williams taught that expanding the zone in which you’ll swing the bat only gives the savvy opponent (his opposing pitcher, and your marketplace reality) a stronger chance of beating you. He did not focus on expanding your zone of capabilities, to expand your opportunities. But sometimes, that’s what an organization needs to do. Foresight can help guide that process, at least by showing you where to look.

How does foresight help?

1). It helps you understand your strike zone, its limits, and whether the opportunities there are growing or declining. Pitchers are like your marketplace, and pitchers around your league have figured you out. You may not get enough good opportunities any more, especially as the marketplace changes.

2). It shows you what’s beyond your strike zone, and motivates you to look at moving there. Where else are there opportunities?

You need to change your approach. The futurist is your batting coach. I’m happy to join you in the batting cage!

_________

If you enjoyed this baseball metaphor, here’s another from a while back:

As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder

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.

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.

Keep an eye on the future while righting the ship

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SS_Principessa_Jolanda_sinkingIn a crisis, organizations focus inward, and work to put things right.They right the ship as a top priority. 

But in a crisis, the long-term still needs attention. An organization fixing things can come up short in laying the stepwise plans its needs for its desired future. Fixing things is reactive, and reacting is not enough. 

Organizations need to keep foresight in the mix while they right the ship. Foresight doesn’t serve you if you only consider it once in a while, and it doesn’t work to put it off. If you take your eye off the ball, there’s a strong chance something fundamental will change in the landscape while you are tied up correcting things. 

Righting the ship is about catching up with the present, not preparing for the future. But if you are only catching up you are, in effect, falling behind. See also: If you're only keeping up, you're probably going backwards.

In troubled times it's understandable that everyone drops into the trenches and rolls up their sleeves to fix things. You need to do more than that.

What do you need to do?

Even in crisis, leaders must keep an eye toward the future. They need to give time for generative discussions about what’s next. This means planning for the future. It means assuming success with the fixes and aspiring to seize new opportunities in the future. And doing so means taking actions now for those future successes. In short, it means confidence in present action, and a focus on the future.

While you work on the present:

  • Expand awareness of what else is going on that will shape your future
  • Build views of where you’re headed (scenarios)
  • Make a ten- or fifteen-year forward view a part of the conversation
  • Identify how “fixing things” is part of your long-term strategy
  • Don’t fail to take actions now that go beyond righting the ship, they build towards your future

IMAGE: S.S. Principessa Jolanda, 1907, listing badly right after launch. Public domain.

Governance and foresight: Views of a futurist/trustee

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28555956016_c3cd0f4ae8_zThis post accompanies “Pitfalls in Governance” 

Foresight needs to become instinctual and habitual for boards. Jeff De Cagna of Foresight First LLC, is doing seminal work on this. He coined the phrase “duty of foresight” to accompany the other duties of trustees: duty of care, duty of loyalty, and duty of obedience.

Foresight is an ongoing process—a culture to foster in a leadership group. Organizations should recruit board members with skill at working in understanding change. It’s common for too many trustees and too many discussions to be about compliance and about confirming actions already taken. Boards need to also be at play in generative discussions about new things, and not merely immersed in old or existing things.

Trustees should frame their own discussions in multi-year terms. They should require organizational leaders to given them tools such as financial statements that focus beyond the current budget year. Ask the organization to build long-term tools for leadership, e.g. a 5- or 10-year budget. Creating it will raise questions of long-term strategy, growth, and assumptions about sustainability. And it will identify of themes and forces of change that impact the organization. 

Boards and their organizations should build scenarios looking 10 years out and check the mission and strategic plans against those. This thinking is not exclusive to the board. But it is a best fit with boards who can stand outside the day-to-day work and crisis-to-crisis action inside the organization. 

To fail to do these things is, in fact, a derelection of duty, the duty of foresight.

Image: Alexis Lewis, via Flickr, Creative Commons attribution license

Pitfalls in governance: Views of a futurist/trustee

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This post addresses the non-profit governance roles of Boards of Trustees. See related post: Governance and Foresight

320px-WolfsgrubeThose in governance have a distinct role that may be at odds with the organizational roles they are used to. In the governance role, you wear a different hat. I bring to this question my own experience in non-profit governance. I am a trustee for two educational institutions. I also have worked as a futurist serving organizational leaders and boards for three decades. My work is about helping them understand change and prepare for the future. I have seen the traps and failures they face.

Trustees have a responsibility for the big picture and the long term. Jeff De Cagna of Foresight First LLC has done seminal work on explaining how and why boards need foresight. He coined the phrase “Duty of Foresight” and is at work to make the recognition of that duty a reality. [LINK]

Here are some of the pitfalls: 

Misunderstanding the governance role. People who join boards don’t always know what governance is. They instinctively act like workers or day-to-day managers of the organization, and may  have a weak or missing eye to the bigger picture.

Only responding to what’s laid in front of you. The role of a Board member is to look beyond, ask questions, frame things in ways different from how those in executive roles do. Here’s a post I wrote on this: “Don’t just answer the question you are asked”

(Only) chasing growth or dollars. A board can have “spreadsheet eyes” and fall into the habit of focusing tightly on financial matters, at the expense of the mission, sustainability, new roles, etc. Yes, the business model may be tracking well in terms of a budget and balance sheet. But is the organization on the right track?

Groupthink. The tendency for a governance group to go along so as to get along. Everyone should be coached to have a “yes, and” or “yes, but” frame of mind. A board’s leadership should model and validate this behavior.

Fix and stop. A temptation in a board role is to see that a problem in the organization is solved and then breathe a sigh of relief and fade back. Instead, the board needs to keep its eyes on the bigger picture, and turn to new issues and opportunities.

Falling out of the governance role. This happens when a Board member/trustee drops into the business of the day-to-day management, overriding decisions (as opposed to asking questions, framing long-term strategic goals, etc.) Some in governance are also in day-to-day roles. They have to be able to switch hats and maintain a mindfulness about which role they are in when.

Failing to exercise the duty of foresight. Last but not least, at the core of responsibility for the long-term success of an organization is anticipating the future. That means looking beyond the usual time horizon the organization considers, to take a view five, ten, or fifteen years out. Here Jeff De Cagna’s work (see above) is vital. I will address this more in a subsequent post. See: Governance and Foresight for more on his vital issue.

The solutions to these problems are in the hands of boards themselves. A board should give its new trustees a proper orientation. In it, they should talk through the role, learn from example cases of things that could come up in their board work. Since board members may also have “roll up your sleeves” duties, such as assisting with fundraising, it’s important to air out the question of which roles each plays, when.

Boards should refresh these lessons each year. People forget. One way to do that is to have existing trustees join new ones in their orientation. They can join in small group discussions of situations that come up for people in the role.

Trustees should get in the habit of saying, “why?” and “does this support our mission?” and “can this be sustainable or help the organization’s sustainability?” And they should call out pitfalls when they see them. "Watch out!" 

Image: pitfall trap for wolf hunting, Germany. Georg Waßmuth, via Wikimedia Commons.

The unreasonable man

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"

If you acknowledge the need for change, sometimes sharp change, then there is a thin line separating the reasonable and unreasonable. What may be a sound plan for change can easily top over into an absurd, unworkable notion. 

Or at least some of the stakeholders involved will think so. This means that fostering change–the change we may need–can mean being distinctly, noisily, objectionably, unreasonable. If you go there for good reason, I've got your back. You're likely to make a difference.

The foresight gap: What too many organizations get wrong

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6THBusinesses aim close. Too often, a business’s view stays on its current realities and where the business is excelling or struggling. The mindset is near-term and management aligns its tools to support that near-term view. This creates a gulf between the challenges and opportunities of the future and the demands of the status quo. It is a foresight gap.

The problem is endemic. Business rewards executives for improving the current business model and processes, but too rarely for charting a smart future course. Businesses measure results with tools which lock them in to present-focused, incremental improvement. That leaves out positive action around change that will shape their destiny in the longer term.

Ideas and behavior around risk create the foresight gap. Baseball offers an analogy. Sometimes a ballplayer who tries to do something hard, like catching a ball that requires him to lunge far to one side, fails at his attempt. The umpires give him an error for not catching the ball. Another, less risk-taking player might not try for the tough catch at all, letting it go by. And then the umpires may not award an error, presuming the ball was un-catchable. The game punishes risk taking and rewards risk avoidance. Business is like that.

As in baseball, businesses tend to punish risk takers when things do not work out. But they reward executives who stay the course. And though staying the course is a poor futures strategy, the business considers taking a longer-term view to be a move into uncertain and risky ground. The business instinct is to pull back from that longer view. Thus the rewards and measures of success are misaligned.

The foresight gap is rooted in these ingrained habits. But it is also true that business leaders often do not know enough about how to look at the future, nor what to do about what they see on their five-, ten-, or twenty-year horizon. That incomplete knowledge leaves them not understanding what foresight is, how to use it, and what to expect from it.

We need to adjust three critical factors to close the foresight gap:

First, we need to encourage a longer view. The conversation in any organization should sometimes be about five, ten, and twenty years hence. That does not leave behind the present and its tactical needs. But it begins to connect the organization’s longer-term success with present action. The future view gives present action a direction other than simple continuity, and it helps business reevaluate, at intervals, its present course.

And what is that future view like? It is an understanding of a range of possibility which must be less sure the further into the future the business looks. But uncertainty about that future should not shut down a consideration of the possibilities.

Second, a business needs to recognize the executives who take a longer-term view for their wisdom, and not put them under suspicion for embracing what is uncertain or unpredictable. Business needs to get comfortable with acting without complete certainty; it is not possible to make good strategy otherwise. The executive who thinks about the future should get validation and the ear of colleagues. But better still; develop the instinct for the long-term view across the leadership of the organization.

Third, the organization needs to get good at monitoring, interpreting, and responding to change. Any organization has a radar screen. That screen by default shows the things that are obvious and clear for the organization: its operations, constituencies, markets, partners and allies, customers, etc. The executive who attends the sector’s conferences, reads the sector’s newsletters, and so on looks like a good leader. But there is a second radar screen that represents the long view and the future success of the organization, and too few organizations have one. That second screen shows future social, economic, and technological changes that have not yet impacted the organization, but will.

Closing the foresight gap means establishing that second radar screen. It means opening up thinking to allow in things that are not yet shaping the business. It means letting in speculative views of possibilities, even when they do not match current thinking and current understanding of the sector or marketplace the organization plays in. Some part of strategic thinking will always be conjecture, and some part of it will always be rooted in a range of possibilities without the surety of prediction.

The foresight gap needs closing, and smart organizations will work to close it by getting smarter about the future, but also by loosening the tight reins they hold on themselves and their leaders. And those organizations will be the ones that win in the long term.

Image: Cathy T, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License.

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