collaboration

Know your type, or, Stop beating your head against a brick wall

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Myers Briggs TypesI am a strong believer in the power and value of understanding personality and cognitive styles as a part of effective work in exploring the future. That’s true even if you are working alone–you need to know your own mind in doing futures work. Are you a black and white thinker, or do you see lots of grey areas? Do you like to use logic or focus on how you feel emotionally about things? Knowing about your cognitive styles and others’ is extremely valuable if you are part of a team that needs to confront change and build strategies for dealing with it. If you’ve found doing that work hard, maybe you don’t know enough about the personalities and cognitive styles on your team.

Most organizational executives have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and at one time knew their Myers-Briggs Type. Mine is I/ENTP, the I/E indicates that I rated about evenly between extroversion and introversion. The N means intuiting, the T, thinking, and the P, perceiving. I first took the test about 20 years ago. It helped me clarify things about my work style and my personal interactions with others.

If you never have known, or have long since forgotten your Myers-Briggs Type, you should go back and take the test. There are several versions free, online. One can be found here, and another here. The online tests are not perfect–they tend to try to find a type with fewer questions than the longer printed versions, but give one a try.

A less-well-known, but particularly useful indiactor is the Kirton Adaptation Innovation Inventory [Link]. It is based on a theory of cognitive style that says everyone is creative, but that there are distinctly different styles of creativity that fall on a continuum from adaptive creative–people who create "inside the box" and innovative creative–those who see no boundaries on their creative ideas. Knowing your place and your colleagues’ place on the continuum can help you understand how you and they will explore choices and potential innovations together.

Unfortunately, the Kirton Centre, which controls the KAI, does not make a do-it-yourself test available, and they believe firmly that you should be tested under the guidance of a certified KAI consultant. No KAI type is inherently good or bad, but as with the Myers Briggs, knowing more about yourself is inherently good–it can make it possible to be more effective and less uncertain in work, dealing with others. 

In my work as a futurist and in collaborating with others in foresight, it has been valuable to know my personality type and cognitive style, and those of my colleagues. It has been clear over the years that some people are not comfortable with conjecture–a critical part of futures work, and some are not instinctive about looking at grey areas, which is also critical in exploring future possibilities. It’s possible to clarify those things in exploring personality and cognitive styles. In almost any setting, having multiple cognitive or personality styles on the team is a good thing. But not understanding the different styles is not a good thing, and can destroy any benefit you might get from variety.

If you are pretty well convinced that one or another colleague is crazy, or that they are of limited mental ability, you may be reacting to their personality type or cognitive style. Surely they are not crazy or stupid, just different. And maybe they’ve got the missing piece you need, if only you could see it and know how to fit it with what you can do.

Foresight is difficult enough without adding layers of misunderstanding and opposition to the effort. Try to understand who you are and who your colleagues are, how they think and react. Your chances of success are much greater if you do. Don’t beat your head against a brick wall.

Scanning the landscape for challenges, issues, trends, and opportunities

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Environmental scanning is the ongoing review of information sources that is integral to identifying trends and monitoring for leading-edge change. To some people who don’t do environmental scanning, it looks like a lot of web surfing and magazine reading—a distraction or waste of time.

How can it be a good use of time? It’s open-ended. Yet futurists urge people in organizations to do more of it. Can business executives really afford to spend that time? What does it yield?

Environmental scanning is a perfectly good fun, and continually interesting, especially since a big portion of it is often driven by one’s interests. But the scanner is left with a little angst—what to do with the stuff? Should I print it out and file it? Should I blog about it? Should I tell someone? Is there some way to collect the good stuff and make it useful?

In fact, the act of scanning can be as loose as it often is, without being ineffective or inefficient. Scanning builds context for one’s thinking about the future. The more accumulated clues, cues, and knowledge you have, the better the chance that analysis and decisions will be properly thought through, tested against existing and emerging realities, and informed by a broad range of contextual forces and factors.

But yes, you should make something of your discoveries. Environmental scanning helps ensure that you get earlier notice of emerging change—issues, trends, and new challenges that may come from beyond your current view, especially from outside your field or sector. It may prevent you from finding out about something critical from a customer, a vendor, or even from a crisis.

A scanning discovery is not of any use until you put it to use so consider these ideas:

  • Drawing a conclusion about what you find for your work. Write it down. You are converting a raw observation into something that may lead to action, a change of direction, a decision to monitor something further, etc.
  • Keeping a “commonplace book”—a note taking place for your discoveries and observations. If you are a good trend spotter, you can log the trends you are observing or discovering. A list of leading edge trends is a powerful tool to draw out for a team discussion, to test ideas, ensure you are thinking comprehensively about a problem or opportunity. Maybe for you this would work as a daily or weekly blog, so colleagues can share your discoveries.
  • Telling your colleagues—one or more people who really should know about what you found. We are glad to share funny YouTube videos, but seem less practiced at sharing a discovered trends, a thought-provoking blog, a story that shapes our understanding of the marketplace.
  • Sharing your discoveries by email/listserve/blog and ask for comment. You might be the right person to “report” on trends and issues this way. If the messages are provocative and suitably well-labeled, you might get ongoing interest. Does your organization have a trend person? Could you take up that role? It might only require a few minutes a week to do that.
  • Using scanning discoveries to provoke dialogue—send a note, for example, that says: “I am seeing a lot of things suggesting a backlash against bottle water—do you think this will come to a head and affect our closures business?”

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

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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