futures

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!

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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

How to use cross impact analysis

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Sometimes a blunt-force tool is best for grinding through the analysis and exploration of ideas.

Cross impact analysis* is just that. It forces you to test out the interactions among a set of forces, trends, or decisions.

The image at the right shows the basic concept, but let’s look a little closer at how to make this tool simple and useful.

In the basic grid you would relate, e.g. Item A to Item B, and Item B to Item A. But working the crosses two ways is hard. To do it more simply, just assume each pair interacts. Also, you don’t cross a thing with itself.

Thus in the stair-step cross impact diagram at the right, we work only in the unshaded cells. With this tool, you can explore emerging change to discover possible future outcomes.

Below is a filled-out example about the future consumer marketplace:

Where to use cross impacts

Cross impact is a back-shop or group-process tool. It is for exploration. Most of the time, nobody will want to see the gory details of your cross impact effort, though it is possible to tidy up and streamline the results for sharing with others.

What can you cross impact?

  • Trends/change forces
  • Proposed actions, strategies, or decisions
  • Different stakeholders, vis-a-vis an issue

Cross impact analysis resource page

For more on cross impact analysis, see: LINK. 

Conclusion

No matter the format used, the cross impact tool insists we acknowledge that nothing happens in a vacuum. That’s its real payoff. And the process of doing the analysis is its strongest benefit. Give it a try. Below is a link for a PDF of a template and instructions. 

Cross impact template and instructions

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*This post gives a view of one of multiple approaches to cross impact analysis. The original form, invented by Ted Gordon and Olaf Helmer [LINK] is a quantitative method for assessing probabilities and/or the magnitude of impacts between different factors or decisions. My use is qualitative and is focused on discovery of potential future outcomes. 

Futurists are presentists: The true purpose of a forecast

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The other day my friend Holly asked me about my track record as a futurist. Holly is a journalist and has a knack for asking quiet, incisive questions.

I had told her about co-authoring a book in the 1990s about the year 2025. [2025 : Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology] Holly’s question got me thinking about the purpose of my work.

It’s reasonable for people to expect futurists to predict the future. But accurate prediction is not the real value of our work. What futurists do is very much about today. Forecasts should show the range of and directions of change that get us started toward a desired future. The forecast endpoint is not the point.

There is little point in framing an idea about the future and then waiting ten or fifteen years to see “Did you get it right?” Today is where foresight has its power. 

The best question I could ask when we get to 2025 is: Did people who read 2025 in the late 1990s act differently because of the ideas in the book?

Why did we write 2025? To help business people in the late 1990s understand change and potential for the future in that year. So my book, 2025, published in 1996, was for people in 1996 to understand future possibility.

As the year 2025 approaches, I still expect to be embarrassed about where we were wrong. Most often that will be about what we did not forecast at all and where we were too optimistic. But I should forget about it. That was not the point or the purpose of the book. 

How should you think about this?

When you work with a futurist or engage with the future, know your today reasons. Allow the process to range imaginatively over future ideas. But don’t worry about certainty and accuracy at some future date. Explore what those ideas tell you about what to do now.

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For some further thoughts on this, see What do futurists really do?

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.

 

Constrained foresight and what to do about it

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How often is foresight (or the lack of it) the weakest link in an organization?

There are always constraints that limit an organization’s progress. Eliyahu M. Goldratt brought this idea to management science in his “Theory of Constraints”. And one constraint is the “weakest link” for an organization. The bottleneck created when packaging equipment runs more slowly than the production line is a common example.

Constrained foresight is a bottleneck
Often the constraint is embodied in the organization's policies and paradigms (see: LINK). Engrained beliefs or habits restrict fresh thinking and thwart change. Foresight may be the victom.

What limits foresight? Low tolerance for talk about the future, a lack of awareness of its value, and insufficient time spent constrain foresight. People in organizations are busy and stressed. Leaders rarely reward people for breaking away from their “real work” to explore change.

Insufficient foresight harms an organization’s ability to change, its capacity for product/service/brand innovation, and the quality of its strategymaking. The organization flies blind into the future. 

Five things you can do about it: 

1. Acknowledge the value and unmet need for foresight. This means building a constituency for futures discussions and for including views 5 or 10 years out in strategic discussions.

2. Find forward-thinking people in the organization that can connect with each other, collaborate, and extend thinking into the future. They can meet ad hoc, or better, regularly for futures discussions.

3. Add futures thinking to your diet. Others are doing valuable work for you, free. Follow bloggers and news feeds that curate and interpret trends and discover leading edge change. And pay it forward—share what you find with your colleagues, and tell them why it’s important.

4. Harness the tools of foresight: environmental scanning and trend analysis and scenario planning, especially.

5. Convene cross-functional groups to assess the organization’s systems for their futures-readiness. An outside futurist can bring the tools and instincts you need to make sure these discussions keep to a longer view. (Call me! 202-271-0444 and jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz)

Foresight is like fitness

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Fitness Studio Fitness Studio Training DumbbellsForesight is work you do to get ready for the future. What will come at you? How ready are you to respond?

Most of what you will have to respond to is out in the unknown space that is your future. But you can prepare for the things you’ll do, though less often the exact things you’ll do. You need general foresight fitness.

Consider the gym-goer. She works out, building strength, flexibility, endurance, and agility. Her goal? Being ready for things she wants to do, and for life itself. She wants to be stronger, more flexible, and to feel good. Then she is better prepared for what life will throw at her. Daily life gives her physical challenges. And she may choose and reach for other challenges. Going in strong, flexible, agile, and with greater endurance makes everything else better.

Fitness as a metaphor for foresight
Fitness goal Foresight goal
Build strength Be more positive, prepared, and intentional about change
Gain endurance Grow the sustainability of your organization. Make it one capable of surviving and mastering change without spending or wearing itself out
Increase flexibility Improve speed to action and readiness to maneuver
Develop agility Become more practiced at responding to change

 

Foresight does this. Here’s how:

Exploring the future means exercising our minds—by exploring “what ifs.” We practice thinking about our response to change. We get stronger at anticipating future change, but also responding to it as it happens.

As with the gym, you can look at general training. Strength training and cardio, for example, give you general fitness. Exploring the future landscape 10 years out gives you strength as you face uncertainty. You can tailor efforts to specific needs. A baseball player works on the power with the bat by using a cable machine to simulate a baseball swing.

You can do something like this with foresight. Scenarios for your sector or a new technology let you prepare for responses to specific challenges and opportunities. 

So what about measurement? The gym analogy weakens. Yes, you can measure muscle and endurance with weights and times. But there isn’t a clear parallel for that in foresight. We don’t count trends gathered, for example, to measure the success of foresight.

But fitness has evolved far from “how much can you bench?” Fitness pros understand what matters is overall fitness, not some “look at me” measure of strength. Old gym rats are still measuring themselves on how much they can bench press or the circumference of their biceps. But modern-day fitness is about broad and holistic good health.

So is foresight. So get fit and stay fit, and you’ll enjoy a healthier future.

I'd love to help you learn more about how to do this. Call/email: 202-271-0444 and jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz. 

Foresight: Seeing the big in the small

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Hop! the following suitcaseA problem I face when deciding what ideas about the future to share is that people tend to have heard of most cutting-edge things I might tell them. Why is that? It’s because the future is well known, or at least specific things about it are.

But sitting just behind the “famous” truths about the future is a lot of critical insight on what the changes that are so well known could actually mean. These insights are most often about a changed system or complex of systems.

Here’s a great example. Designer Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez has developed a rolling suitcase that follows its owner [Link]. The suitcase has a motor, and uses three Bluetooth receivers to triangulate on the owner’s smart phone. What a great idea. Some will find it fun, some mind-boggling.

But when we see a development like that, we don’t really know what it means. What does that add up to? Does it change our lives that much? Does it change anything more than the way you take your suitcase along? Or is it just a suitcase that follows you?

It’s the bigger system that smart things like this suitcase is a part of that matters, not a singular, however delightful, technological development. The work of foresight includes not just learning about a technology like that, but seeing how it fits with other emerging change, whether it represents a narrow example of a much greater possibility. One task is to say, what if there was more of that sort of thing? What would it mean? Another is to say, does this technology prove possibilities that could spread to other uses?

So put that smart suitcase in a wider context. It’s about technology that serves us: quietly, obediently, automatically, conveniently. It’s about adding smarts to ordinary things so that they serve us better. It’s about technologies that anticipate our needs, and respond to them flexibly. And its about harnessing automation outside of the factory–for daily, ordinary, human use.

This way of thinking has helped people move from the notion of a 3D printer — device that “prints” objects — to the idea of additive manufacturing, where complex objects can be produced flexibly, even custom, by laying up material, instead of carving it away or molding it. It led to further thoughts: if you can print a plastic object, why not food, or human tissues?

So when you see news like the story of Hop! the following suitcase, the thing to do is to think: what else could be like that? What is this helping us learn to do and learn to imagine. So we can thank Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez for a smart suitcase, but we can also thank him for stirring our imaginations and inspiring more ideas and innovation.

Image: Gizmag.com

Sensemaking and strangemaking

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At the 2012 Association of Professional Futurists Professional Development day in Toronto, July 2012, we explored design thinking and its role in futures. In the orienting discussions that led off our design work, we talked about the roles futurists play in helping people explore our changing world and what it means. And that role is a frequent topic of this blog, too.

I had not before used the term “strangemaking,” but our design-focused presenters, including Greg Van Alstyne, of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Strategic Innovation Lab, and Lloyd Walker, Precurve, who is a long-time futures colleague, talked about how part of the work of foresight is “strangemaking” which designers sometimes refer to as meaning to make the familiar, strange.

Exploring the future should include strangemaking. And then, on the other hand, it should also include sensemaking. I guess that looks like a contradiction, but the view is clear: when an organization is too focused on what it knows, too narrowly following and building within the familiar, it needs to think new thoughts, try new ideas, and so make the familiar strange for a while.

Meanwhile, most organizations are confronted with an awful lot that is strange or unclear. Usually that is what lies in the blurry periphery of what they know and can see and understand. For them, a big need is sensemaking. They need help, help that a futurist, among others, can offer, in getting clear on the changes surrounding them and in finding new ways of thinking about their interests, their stakeholders, their markets, and so on.

So, on balance, what is my job as a futurist? I think it is to draw the strange in for a close look, let it be strange and new to people, but then before long to help them understand it.

So let’s help people:

1). Make the familiar strange, by showing some surprising but plausible ways it could change, keeping the focus on what isn’t true today but what could be true in the future. That will even mean spending time looking at extreme possibilities.

2). Make the strange familiar, not by avoiding it, or ignoring it, or trying to force it into something it’s not, but rather by framing up a view of the future in a way that helps people understand and interpret it.

That balance of purposes is a thought that futurist Peter Bishop, the leader of the University of Houston Futures Studies in Commerce program crystallized for our Toronto gathering. It’s not sensemaking or strangemaking, it’s both. Thanks Peter!

Our Role in Shaping the Future

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I am hoping you’ll take a moment to complete a quick SURVEY. It’s focused on how what people do shapes the future.

In late July my colleague Jennifer Jarratt and I will offer a conference session at the WorldFuture 2012 Conference called “Our Role in Shaping the Future“. We will explore the critical role of human agency: what you, and I, and anyone does to shape society, in shaping mankind’s future.

This is perhaps the seminal question for anyone engaged in foresight. We have to wonder: Does what we do matter? and, What human action makes a difference, even at the individual level?

Our session is on Saturday, July 27, 2012, at the conference in Toronto. Here is the session description:

Futures work depends on identifying patterns of change, understanding data and systems, determining forces, and drivers shaping an organization or a society. These are important. Less often explored is the idea of human agency. Human agency is our own ability to be actors and shapers of our own future and that of others. Our decisions and actions make a difference beyond ourselves.

Sometimes a decision is fateful because it opens a vision to the future far wider than the individual’s own path: Rachel Carson’s decision to write Silent Spring,for example. More often, it is an everyday act, such as taking a job, helping someone clarify a decision, or leading a group.

In this session we explore the idea of human agency and how to use it in shaping more positive futures in small and large ways. Attendees can participate in an online survey (at www.leadingfuturists.biz) of how and why people think about the future, their motivations, and, potentially, their changed behavior.

The SURVEY is our chance to gather your insights on how what people do matters to shaping the future. Please give us a few minutes of your time, if you can. There’s a link in the survey where you can ask for the results, too.

Nukes and foresight

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People have trouble assessing, comparing, and understanding risk in our world. Incidents like the the March 2011 Japanese nuclear disaster highlight this, and wake us up to why we need to understand risk, and risk over time, better. With their broad, systems view and long time horizons, the tools that futurists use are great for improving that thinking.

Nuclear energy involves two kinds of risk: acute and chronic. The acute risks are energy plant failure, radiation releases, and core meltdowns. The chronic risks come from maintaining and protecting the nuclear plant over time, and most importantly, safely storing spent nuclear fuel. That aspect could not be more long-term in human society terms. Some products of nuclear fission have half-lives in the range of tens of thousands, or millions of years. Can we even imagine human life in 22011 or 32011? But that long period is what we are affecting with our actions today.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel use looks like a routine, manageable process with straightforward issues of price and supply. But in fact, hydrocarbons are doing ongoing, cumulating damage to the environment, a long-term, chronic problem. Because its chronic, but less visible, and less scary to people overall, hydrocarbon energy seems safer to us.

When we compare these two main energy sources, we have to understand the relationships to time and risk, and they differ, near vs. long-term impacts, acute vs. chronic risk, near vs. long-term costs, and so on.

We can benefit from exploring these differences, in helping people understand the future and the impacts of human action, near and long-term. And we can benefit from thinking about them as a way to portray, and study complex relationships in complex systems.

Unfortunately, people, including decisionmakers, tend to be weak at thinking about the broader systems and longer-term relationships. And whether they are skilled at that or not, the political pressures tend to force issues into narrower frameworks.

The tools of foresight, including systems thinking and scenarios can make a difference to getting people to understand the complex relationships and make more valid comparisons as they think through issues like this. 

So I guess the first step is to take a futurist to lunch!

Image: BlatantNews.com via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License

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