execution

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.

 

A view of the future has to speak to today

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To be useful, a vision of the future has to speak to today. It has to help you decide on things to do right now.

Savvy foresight clients always say to me that they need the "what for" in the work we do for them. They mean, they want insights and help figuring out what the future view we're helping them have means to what they have to do right now.

And they are exactly right. Without connections to our lives and work today, a view of the future is not much more than playing with ideas–fun, entertaining, but not helpful.

At the same time, it's essential to not let the focus on "what for" back you off from really exploring your future. Working on strategy without a true view into the future is downright dangerous. It is fire, ready, aim.

So what are you supposed to do? It's simple to recognize, but hard to execute. You need to build views of your future, for example ten years from now–2021–and then focus carefully on how things would change, and what you would need or want to do between now and that year. 

You can work backwards or forwards doing this: tracing possible pathways from today to 2021 or working back in time from the 2021 outcomes to see how we might have gotten there, or working backwards and forwards in time. 

Ultimately, with ideas about where things are headed, and what changes will or must begin to happen now, your strategic options and needs will show through. You will have connected a view of 2021 to things you need to do right now, and you will have made the future relevant to today and clearly connected to your actions now.

So to put it succinctly, any foresight activity should end with "now let's begin."

 

Image: adapted from Mike Licht, notionscapital.com, via Flickr, cc attribution license

Execute, yes, but execute for the future

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Not long ago, we heard the leader of a big organization say “strategy is easy.” “Execution,” he said, “is the hard part.” That set our teeth on edge. As futurists, we have to be vigilant that organizations don’t execute the wrong strategies, and they often make strategy without enough foresight.

“Let’s roll,” were Todd Beamer’s heroic words on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania that kept the 9/11 terrorists from one of their Washington targets. That mindset continues in organizations where frustration with deferred changes and unmet opportunities have leaders intent on execution. Their leaders believe they know what needs to be done, and they are people who want to take action. 

There’s nothing wrong with execution
The groundswell in leadership right now about execution is an understandable reaction to organizational frustration with not getting change implemented. The movement stresses successfully carrying out new strategies by becoming more effective in turning ideas into action.

The leadership literature on execution, e.g. Ram Charan, Charles Burck, and Larry Bossidy’s Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (2002), focuses on closing the gap between aspiration and results. Again, it’s hard to argue with that.

But look a little closer. We stand in danger of trying to perfect our organizations for the present or even the recent past. We really have to build them better—indeed execute better—for the emerging conditions and realities we will face.

Despite improving economic prospects, organizations will almost certainly continue in the “let’s roll” mindset. Foresight needs to not get lost in the wave of energy for execution.

What you can do
You may need to catch up with and keep up with those who are intent on implementing organizational change and keep them focused on changing realities. Your role in challenging assumptions about the future is still critical.

You need to help leaders have things to do, not just more things to think. Some examples:

  • Prepare a whitepaper on critical forces of change for the executive team
  • Encourage the chief to attend Microsoft’s CEO summit or another forward-looking event
  • Create a learning trip to places where important changes are observable first hand
  • Work with those responsible for executive development and succession to build foresight into the skillsets of future leaders. 

So find the new openings for foresight in the culture of execution. Let’s roll!

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