assumptions

Not good enough

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Not good enough: poor performance on the foresight testThere’s bad news for an awful lot of organizations. Their grip on the future is weak or nothing. They react, instead of responding and acting. Their view is narrow instead of broad. They think they know the future, but their grip on it is superficial at best.

Why? Ideas about change and the future come in little, trivial scatters, instead of being taken up comprehensively. Everything we do is part of a complex of systems. The questions are not narrow or simple, and the assumptions we work and act on are based in ever-changing conditions. But we oversimplify, bound, and narrow our thinking when we need to do exactly the opposite.

In all this, executives may even be rewarded for their narrow, specialized knowledge and abilities. Outcomes and outputs are measured in narrow ways. Progress in some areas completely hides decline, as when the measures are gross and cross-company. For example, an international company looking at its total revenues could see overall growth when in fact its fortunes and businesses are in decline in its base markets. Global growth often masks soft or declining markets.

What can you do about this?

It’s time to change your thinking. Part of this is being humble: admit you are always on a quest to know more and understand change better. Part is to open, and keep open a conversation about change and about your future. Recognize new ideas about the future and reward them. Let in the controversial and the scary ideas that may come with a frank acknowledgement that you need to know more and you need to change.

Break loose from the “what’s wrong let’s fix it” mentality of most managers. While you fix, you also need to change things. Your current reality is not the whole story, and your current view of what needs doing is not enough.

Spend time explicitly talking about where things are going, how your markets are evolving, and what you might do about it. Plan to build for resilience, not based on certainty–you won’t have that, but based on your best sense of the range of possibilities. And make the organization strong–ready it for uncertainty by building in divergent thought, new skills, wider partnerships and relationships, and deep and continuing intelligence on the world–the whole world, and how it’s changing.

Six things fiction writing taught me about foresight

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI have posted at johnmahaffie.com, the inverse of this theme: Six things studying the future has taught me about fiction writing

I’ve spent a couple of years deep in the ranks of amateur novelists, working on a couple of novels, which I will confess, though I am a futurist, are set in the past, one in 1916, and one in the 1970s. I am still learning the basics by writing fiction every day, but doing it has already paid off for my work as a futurist. How? Several ways.

1. The parts of the story not told
In building a body of work for a futures project, I learn a lot, and think a lot, and develop a lot of ideas. I collect lots of information. I begin to know the “whole” future that my client faces, or at least have a large body of conjecture about it. But like the readers of a novel, my clients don’t want to know everything about the future, just the part that matters and that they can act on. So, overall, what I discovered in writing my novels is, don’t put something in just because you thought of it and researched it, and went some trouble to create it. That’s not your reader’s, or your client’s problem.

2. Things are complicated
Reinforcing the lesson of foresight, and one that I can benefit from learning, relearning, and building upon, is that human systems are complex: there’s never just one cause for a change, the swirl of forces large and small shape and reshape the destiny of people, families, towns, cities, societies, humankind. In building stories about people, you get a stronger sense of that, it’s the combination of forces that create change.

3. Point of view matters
Writers have to work out the point of view, and the voice they use to get across their stories. In foresight, getting the story told, or the forecast communicated, or the call to action made, means understanding who you are exploring the future for, what’s in their heads, and what needs to be in their heads. We spend a lot of time working out what future to focus on, how to frame ideas about change, and whose interests we have in mind in doing so. The first acts of a foresight initiative involve answering the question, “What future?

4. What’s worth exploring is change
There’s not much for the futurist to do in exploring the present, other folks are far more expert at that. Our value is in looking at change and the intersections of different kinds of change. In fiction, it’s also change that matters. If a character doesn’t change, if there are no points of no return, if nothing really happens, you’ve set a scene but not told a story. In foresight, if you get caught up in the discovery of what’s going on now, you may end up a little smarter, but it’s much more valuable to get at vital changes, what they mean, and how things could turn out.

5. Show don’t tell
Good futures work is about conveying insights and wisdom, but also about explaining, supporting, and giving examples. So like the writer admonished to “show, don’t tell,” in communicating about the future, examples and specifics and the concrete do better work than generalities. Concepts and new framings are powerful, but without the support of a “such as,” or “for example” the listener or reader may not get or accept what you are talking about.

6. Story telling is the thing
Futures work includes telling stories, often those are scenarios–narratives of the future. And the more they work as stories, the better a job they do in getting ideas about the future across to people. The scenarios I’ve worked on lately are better stories, with greater attention to real human lives, ideas, and reactions. Too much of my work in the past played out technologies for technologies’ sake, at the expense of true, deep insights on people. It’s not that I didn’t know the importance of people in futures stories, it’s just that I’ve gained strength in know how to focus on that side.

Image: rahego, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

Ask the hard questions

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The thoughts here continue from my previous post, Question Continuity.

Your future in questionOnce you have recognized that you cannot assume continuity across the systems, technologies, relationships, etc. you depend on, you should recognize that you have to ask some tough questions: “Do we have a future?” “What makes us think so?” “What could disrupt the systems we rely on?” and “What do we have to do to ensure our future?” You have to ask these questions bravely and honestly, getting past assumptions of continuity.

The scanning that supports probing those questions has a different character than routine organizational scanning. It puts a focus on the fundamental and big systems in global society, on changes in technology, on changing in the global economy, and on threats from other areas of knowledge and professions. It lets in the more-speculative provocations and leading edge of change discoveries that are not normally on an organization’s radar screen, or that it may have difficulty conceptualizing and facing.

A valuable step in the process is to build positive and negative scenarios for the organization’s future, and use them to explore the potential for disruptive change. The scenarios don’t assume continuity. Some of them challenge it, and propose alternative futures in which there is sharp change or negative outcomes. Those possibilities need to be the focus of scanning and monitoring regarding the organization’s future.

If your “what if” scenarios don’t shake people up, they probably are not about the tough questions you need to ask.

Question continuity

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Slide Rule
Did the makers of slide rules assume too much continuity?

An organization’s routine strategymaking has to include ongoing explorations of the forces, issues, and trends in its internal and external environment. That is environmental scanning, and the process is routine for any well-led organization. But too often our scanning focus is too narrow and is based on assumptions of continuity.

Here’s why that happens. When you look at your future from today, and explore the topics you already know are part of your business, you are focusing tightly on your existing systems, processes, relationships, technologies, and the trends and forces shaping them. In doing that, you can too easily assume your organization, or your profession, or your sector, or your product/technology will continue as it has. And unfortunately, that’s the kind of routine environmental scanning that organizations do.

Is this what the makers of “adding machines”—the mechanical calculators of three or four decades ago thought? The slide rule? Probably. They just kept working to get better at the same business, assuming continuity.

But your continuity is not assured—it is essential to question it. Bigger things—things you may not be looking at carefully—can disrupt or destroy the pathway you are on. You need to question that pathway, and explore what could change your game entirely. That means asking some tough questions and changing the way you explore your future. Those points are the subject of another post.

These thoughts continue in the post “Ask the Hard Questions“

Image: Dominic’s Pics, cc attribution license, via Flickr

Don’t just answer the question you are asked

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wrong questionInnocently or not, you are often asked a specific, even narrow question. Your natural tendency is to answer it, on its own terms, as asked. This happens all the time in organizations grappling with change. Most of the time, the asker is only trying to get the answer they think they need. They assume they are asking the right question.

But you may well need to change the question.

It’s colud be the wrong question

It probably rests on old thinking

It’s most likely based on conventional wisdom

It may be too narrowly focused, or focused on the wrong question or issue

It’s view is probably too narrow and too close to the action

So you need, often if not always, to change the question. Usually, that means to open up the thinking behind it, to put more up for a re-think.

Interpreting the intangible

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“There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.” –Natalie Clifford Barney*
 
IcebreakerBarney was not thinking, per se, about the future when she wrote this. We probably should not accept that there are “realities” in our future, since the future does not exist. But this insight is valuable in considering the future.
 
Some thoughts for foresight from this insight:
 
Intangible realities — We should assume that we don’t know enough about the future, and try to discover more about the forces and trends shaping it. We need to try to make the possibilities more tangible. This means researching the changes unfolding now to find out more, testing out ideas about what might happen, and sharing and critiquing our assumptions about them with others. We cannot make the future tangible, but we can get clearer about the possibilities, and what's at stake.
 
Formless and without words – This is what leaves most people unable, or unwilling to try to understand the future–it cannot be measured, photographed, or described with any certainty. But giving words to the future possibilities, and trying to describe them to each other, are critical steps in making them more tangible and thus something we can act on.
 
No one has thought out – Saying what these potential futures would mean to what we care about is critical, and we can begin to do that when we have taken a closer look at how things are changing, and shared our best insights on what is happening and could happen.
 
Lack of interpreters – Let’s be sure we don’t exclude the future from what we’re doing by assigning ourselves the role of interpreter. Somebody has to do it, and it probably has to be us.
 
*Natalie Clifford Barney was an American playwright and novelist, 1876–1972. She lived as an expatriate in Paris
 
Thanks to Jay Chatzkel, Progressive Practices, Beyond the Deal newsletter, for sharing this insightful quote

Making the case for foresight: 9 reasons why a global crisis is a critical time to think about the future

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  1. Local, regional, national, global and organizational recovery depends on actions we take now. We cannot wait to begin new strategic initiatives and we cannot descend into the purely tactical and expect to succeed in the long term.
  2. Everything is changing, and many things are called into question. This is a critical moment to move our focus past narrow interests and look at the bigger systems that we are part of. [See: Our big test]
  3. Most of what we do has to be re-thought as our core assumptions about the marketplace get reexamined. The organizations that get that thinking going now can be ahead of their competitors in tackling new opportunities that will emerge when the economy stabilizes, and, hopefully, begins to grow again.
  4. Foresight now can help us have positive thoughts by moving our thinking beyond the immediate crisis to build an opportunity focus, not just a problem focus. We can work to get un-stuck, focus on what we can control, and begin to move forward. [See: Foresight helps you get un-stuck]
  5. Because so many systems are disrupted, we may be free from the usual constraints on our thoughts and ideas to think wholly fresh thoughts about our markets, sector, products, and so on [See: Does the economic crisis create an opening?]
  6. A fresh look at the market, and the skills, technologies, contacts, products, and so on that we have to leverage could yield ideas with low- or zero-budget impact that we can do now.
  7. Now may be the time to “rebuild it better”. In other words, some of the systems, processes, and businesses we have had may best be not shored up and revived as they were, but might better be rethought completely.
  8. Get an edge on the competition. Others may be in a weakened condition and will not be focused on opportunities. The ability to envision a positive path forward and begin to take action toward it now will mean near and longer-term success in the marketplace.
  9. Despite tough times, if we have a positive outlook, a vision, and plans for action, we are likely to give others confidence in us. For example, in tight credit market, lenders will favor those with a positive spirit and a clear path forward. We can show our customers, vendors, business partners, lenders, investors, shareholders, and so on, a positive outlook and strategic view forward.

In 20xx, I believe that _____________________.

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Organizations decide things based on assumptions about the future held by their leaders, decisionmakers, and the people who counsel those leaders. If those people haven’t thought much about the future, and don’t have clear futures assumptions, their organization will probably just be following what others do, or reacting to what’s right in front of it. That is not how to run an organization, and it’s not how to face change, prepared.

People hold certain assumptions about the future and the substance of those assumptions, their rationales, and how they are communicated, are critical to an organization. The clarity and quality of decisions depend on well-considered assumptions, and yet those assumptions are too rarely brought to the surface for debate and discussion. 

In fact, each of us is capable of not even being clear in our own mind in our assumptions about the future.

What can you do to get assumptions out in the open? A simple and effective tool is to ask people to complete a statement: In the year 20xx, I believe that _________________. Then a team can discuss what they think, probe a little deeper, and drive to a consensus, agree to dig a little deeper, or agree that they disagree. In any case, you can move forward a little clearer on what everyone thinks.

Facing the future, together

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Breakout Groups Exploring the FutureMost organizations do not stop to think about the future nor share and examine their assumptions about it very often. That can lead an organization to at best optimize on what it does now at the expense of building the capacities it needs for the future.

One way to begin to explore the future in an organization is to hold a futures event. There are plenty of ways to do so, but they center on one thing: adding new thinking to the organization’s current thinking.

Along with stirring new ideas into the organization, futures events help people surface, share, examine, and challenge assumptions about the future that drive what the organization is doing.

The tools and perspectives of futures thinking, if they do nothing else, help people discover the often-latent assumptions about the future that they are using to make decisions today.

A futures event is a powerful way to do this—with lots of people and in an intensive way. A well-designed futures event will get people to set aside their day-to-day concerns and responsibilities and think on behalf of their organization about what is changing in their market, their sector, and the world that is offering opportunities and challenges.

Some futures events drive to specific, actionable conclusions. Others, like a church revival service, strive only to change and enliven people’s thinking and settle new ideas in their heads that inform their decisionmaking going forward. Thus the range of purposes/outcomes of a futures event stretch from raising consciousness about change to defining immediate and longer-term actions for the organization.

A middle ground for this spectrum of possibility is to design an event that implicitly or explicitly rearranges the organization’s priorities. Thus a technology firm, might, for example, discover that change in the world has put water resources at the top of the list of problems to be solved. That discover leads them to mark it as an area of emerging opportunity and R&D priority.

We will be sharing more thoughts on ways to design futures events on this site, in the coming weeks.

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