John Mahaffie

Use foresight to challenge organizational instincts

February 18, 2025October 9, 2012 by John B. Mahaffie

In watching the organizations I serve confront change and make strategy, I have realized that each of them works intently to do the right things, day by day. They follow their instincts and often those instincts are cautious or self-protective or defensive.

Confronted with a changing marketplace, rising competition, or new technology, they often respond by trying to do what they already do, only a little better. Pride and instinct focus them on working to get better at the game they already play.

This instinctive focus is made of: trimming costs, improving products and services, winning a larger market share, raising profit margins, looking for brand extensions or product extensions, and seizing more of the space in their sector.

Some of this may be future-focused, but it takes a narrow view even then. It assumes continuity in the marketplace.

But we don’t have continuity in the marketplace. At best, a continuity view will get you a few years’ relative success. Meanwhile changes will emerge while you’re busy keeping things going. It’s like the firemen in a steamship, deep below decks, shoveling in coal to keep the screws turning, but with no pilot at the helm.

So as the old cliche says, an organization needs to “get outside its comfort zone”. It needs to examine its instinctive behavior, and find out if the focus is too narrow, too short term, or too routine.

Some simple things about foresight will help:

1). a long-term view makes it likely that you will look beyond the known and beyond only playing out the game that you are in now

2). a broader view of the forces, trends, and players that are part of your organization’s environment will help you see past the customary boundaries that you think are shaping your destiny

3). a more creative view of the future and possibilities for your organization in it can help you see things that don’t yet exist, and that could present great challenges or big opportunities for your future

So don’t rely only on your instincts, or better yet, change those instincts: let in the impulse to challenge everything, and keep a focus on change, and changing how you think and what you do.

Several years ago I wrote a post that gets at organizational timidity in a slightly different way:

https://foresightculture.com/2008/06/04/as-long-as-you-do-whats-conventional-you-wont-be-accused-of-a-blunder

Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwestern Division, via Flickr, cc Attribution license.

Ask the hard questions

February 18, 2025November 3, 2011 by John B. Mahaffie

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

Once 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

February 18, 2025November 1, 2011 by John B. Mahaffie

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