organizations

What keeps organizations stuck in the present?

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What keeps an organization stuck in the present (or struggling to get out of the past)?:

  • Holding on to sunk investment — Organizations hold tight to the big systems and assets they have invested in, often limiting their ability to move elsewhere, but also framing their thinking about what they can and should do.
  • Tradition — For example, social organizations such as the Boy Scouts or Freemasons have deep-set traditions that factor in their ability to even conceive of change. 
  • Inability to change the business model — Corporations and nonprofits face limits on their ability to evolve or jump to a new revenue or business model, for example to scale up or down their revenues, sales or donor volume, etc.
  • Defined by others — For example, the United States Air Force struggles to take up roles in cybersecurity. It is defined historically and in the public eye by its role for 70 years operating military aircraft. Similarly, organizations are often defined by Wall Street. A blue chip firm isn’t supposed to suddenly act like a start up, plunging into a new marketplace, or taking its operations and investment in a new direction.
  • Market drifting away — For example, cable outlets such as ESPN may have a steady-state view of their markets and an interest in continuing to push for market share and viewership, even as entertainment viewing has moved to mobile devices, non-real-time viewing
  • Fear of change/inability to imagine positive change — Not having a positive vision of what’s ahead, or at least a sense of taking intentional action to try for a positive future leaves organizations locked in current, often defensive behavior.
  • Pollyannism — Excessive optimism — the habit of thinking things will come around or that there are no threats that really matter. A simple human tendency or temperament, this can also be an affliction of whole organizations.

What to do about it — How to get un-stuck

1. Inventory how your organization is stuck. Pull together a few colleagues who you think are ready to think differently. Together, inventory the way your organization is “stuck”. Consider each of the items above. Which applies to your organization. How?

2. Identify critical forces of change. Make the case for change. Decide what those critical forces mean. Do they compel you to make changes? What is stopping you?

3. Pose sobering, critical “what ifs” for the organization. These should be powerful changes that would require the organization to change. What do they imply you need to do differently?

4. Get beyond key biases. Tell each other what they are. List them. What are they rooted in? See more here.

5.http://Setting aside biases Armed with these self-assessments, open up the conversation about needed change. Go at it. Don’t backslide!

Other prior posts with some good insights on this:

Image: Han Solo in Carbonite, William Warby, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution license

Keep an eye on the future while righting the ship

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SS_Principessa_Jolanda_sinkingIn a crisis, organizations focus inward, and work to put things right.They right the ship as a top priority. 

But in a crisis, the long-term still needs attention. An organization fixing things can come up short in laying the stepwise plans its needs for its desired future. Fixing things is reactive, and reacting is not enough. 

Organizations need to keep foresight in the mix while they right the ship. Foresight doesn’t serve you if you only consider it once in a while, and it doesn’t work to put it off. If you take your eye off the ball, there’s a strong chance something fundamental will change in the landscape while you are tied up correcting things. 

Righting the ship is about catching up with the present, not preparing for the future. But if you are only catching up you are, in effect, falling behind. See also: If you're only keeping up, you're probably going backwards.

In troubled times it's understandable that everyone drops into the trenches and rolls up their sleeves to fix things. You need to do more than that.

What do you need to do?

Even in crisis, leaders must keep an eye toward the future. They need to give time for generative discussions about what’s next. This means planning for the future. It means assuming success with the fixes and aspiring to seize new opportunities in the future. And doing so means taking actions now for those future successes. In short, it means confidence in present action, and a focus on the future.

While you work on the present:

  • Expand awareness of what else is going on that will shape your future
  • Build views of where you’re headed (scenarios)
  • Make a ten- or fifteen-year forward view a part of the conversation
  • Identify how “fixing things” is part of your long-term strategy
  • Don’t fail to take actions now that go beyond righting the ship, they build towards your future

IMAGE: S.S. Principessa Jolanda, 1907, listing badly right after launch. Public domain.

7 first steps for building an organization’s foresight

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handcrankAre you in a place where you want to kick-start foresight, but you are not sure how to start? You can start simple and you can succeed. But you probably can’t just leap in with a big splash, even if you’re the chief. You need to lay some groundwork.

Below are seven ways to get started that will help you:

  • Test the waters for foresight in the organization
  • Get the organization used to the idea of exploring the future
  • Learn how to explore your future effectively, and learn what works best in your situation
  • Build a name for yourself in your organization for foresight

What you can do:

  1. Have an actual conversation about your organization’s future, an open, thoughtful, creative one, with colleagues. Then talk about how it went, what it meant to everyone, and how you can have more—far more such conversations. This is a show-them-what-it-would-be-like moment, and may be essential to building your case for more foresight. You could establish a pattern of having lunch discussions on critical futures topics, such as “first Friday” of the month. If you can get interesting future-focused guests to share insights, so much the better
  2. Find kindred spirits in your organization that will join you in exploring the future, and encourage you, remind you, challenge you in doing so. You might do this by sharing an article or blog post on the future, and seeing who seems interested. Or schedule a brown bag lunch discussion, e.g. as described in no. 1 here. Keep in touch with these folks, involve them, seek their counsel. Build a foresight community.
  3. Do environmental scanning–Start learning about the wider world of forces, trends, issues, challenges, and opportunities that you face. That means carving out some time to do what is called environmental scanning–exploring for new trends, ideas, issues across all sorts of media. Join listserv and other online discussions on the future, and become a channel of new insights from those into your organization. It won’t seem like you are doing your work at first, maybe, but as soon as you discover fresh insights and see how they fit, you’ll feel justified in the time spent. You probably do these things anyway. Bring a focus to it, and pay out results.
  4. Pay it forward—Pay it forward means sharing your new insights on change as widely as you can, as noted. Pick up the role of scout for things important to your organization. Share discoveries, and build yourself a reputation for valued insights.
  5. Find outside encouragement, e.g. joining with others in professional associations who explore the future and strategy. Examples include the Association for Professional Futurists, the World Future Society, the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals. Some of those organizations have local chapters and each has a vigorous online presence. They are not expensive to join.
  6. Get visible about it–Commandeer a wall, whiteboard, or similar, and put some questions up: “What are the top trends shaping our future?” “What are we not talking about that we should?” Get a conversation going, share and nurture the comments.
  7. Play the role of futurist–Make a habit of saying, in every reasonable place at a meeting or in a discussion, “can we take a moment and look at how this plays out, longer term?” Playing this gentle but persistent futurist role will keep the future a part of the conversation. Be the futurist in the room.

Good luck!

Image: www.sodahead.com

Futurist as Missionary, Salesperson, Politician, Counselor

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2429091134_b829eb0d2c_mUltimately, your efforts around foresight–for their relevance, for their impact, for the willingness of your stakeholders to engage and get behind them, come down to agency*. How much room for action, maneuver, and strategy do you have or can you have?

Your degree of agency will shape expectations that you or the team you work with will take on a smaller or larger scope of change. To build agency, you probably have to take up new roles.

Consider the Low Hanging Fruit model I wrote about earlier. Most players have a little bit of maneuver, and some have a  lot. The low-hanging fruit, those actions that don’t imply big spending, revolutionary change in the organization’s operations and systems, and, to put it simply, don’t require much permission, those are easy, doable–middle level executives, or even an individual, may have the authority (agency) to take positive action.

But the levels considered more serious–big-systems change–require a lot more stakeholders to be on board: the boss, customers, regulators, the CFO, board members, etc. Your or a small team you assemble to explore change cannot act alone. Your agency is insufficient.

And in foresight, nearly always, you will discover a wider arena for action, or bigger strategic moves that make sense. In my work, it’s routine for executives to find, as we work on the future together, that they need more permission, more buy-in, more access, maybe more money than they expected. Scratching the surface of change reveals far more that needs reconsideration. The small question becomes a big question.

You may lack the agency to take the issues and changes you discover on, and you will need to build further capacity to orchestrate change. That means playing new roles you may not be used to.

New roles you’ll play: Missionary, Salesperson, Politician, Counselor 

Making the case for change with rationales, data, explanations, convincing arguments. If the future state you anticipate is to be understood and believed in, you will need to make it so. This means you are a missionary.

Getting buy-in from the executive-level. They may need to have “been there” to truly see the need for the strategy, so you will need to bring them into the conversation, give them rationales. This demands you be a salesperson.

Getting buy-in from the rank and file. This next wave of change will benefit from far more people being on board, if not in the decisionmaking, then in the rationales for the changes. Your “big system” changes will affect far more people. And change is scary, mysterious until explained. This may mean you are a politician.

An ability to surprise people without being rejected. You can’t usually go into a fresh look at your future without encountering surprises. In fact, if you don’t you are probably not being effective. Your surprises will probably be even more unexpected for your constituents. For this you will need to soothe fears, you’ll be a counselor.

So look for how you need to build agency, and consider what roles you are stepping into. It will make a difference to your success, and break down some of your frustrations as you confront the need for change.

Image: Mariano Kamp, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

*I define agency here as: the capacity for exerting power or control in order to change something.

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!

Use foresight to avoid losing your way

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Compass: don't lose your way!
It’s too easy to swap your organization’s true mission for single-mindedness about preserving and defending the institution as an institution. The clear and broad view you get with foresight can help you avoid that.
Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, published an essay, “The ‘Veritas’ About Harvard” in the October 2, 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, he offers a fierce critique of Harvard. He accuses the University of having invested part of its enormous endowment (which is tens of billions of dollars) merely in the apparatus of the institution-staff and buildings, rather than in extending Harvard’s quality education to more students. What Harvard did with its money, in his view, is build a lot of new, glossy buildings and grow its staff, which would seemingly make it able to raise the number of undergraduates. But it did not.
Carey makes the point that: “money is the great leveler: It makes even the smartest people in the world act stupidly.” What was stupid about Harvard’s investments? They invested to preserve the institution, rather than further its mission. Harvard invested to extend its prestige and exclusivity, and the privileges of its elite faculty and leadership, rather than to extend education to more students. Carey notes: “An institution truly dedicated to teaching students has natural limits on how much money it needs. At some point, the land and space and professors suffice.”
This harsh critique leveled at Harvard suggests a wider lesson that can be critical to almost any institution as it builds toward its future. Institutions too easily take a single-minded continue-at-all-costs view that can blind their leaders to their true or original purposes. The narrowness may not be intentional, but it’s powerful and can destroy what matters most. I don’t suggest that institutions give up all aspirations of growth and financial security, just that they reflect with some care on what they are doing, and step back and take a long-term view.
It’s reasonable to argue, and some of the online commenters on the Carey piece do, that Harvard is a private institution that can do whatever it wants. That’s true, but I’ll bet overall it is not the intention of Harvard to merely build enormous wealth and extend its holdings in Cambridge. I’ll bet the University still wants to be a premier educational institution and to make a difference in the world. It’s the demanding financial beast that Harvard became that threatens to pull it away from its true mission:
“Harvard College adheres to the purposes for which the Charter of 1650 was granted: ‘The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….’ In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities.”
How does foresight help? If you take a deeper look into the future, it is often easier to see past the immediate needs of the institution, namely money: this quarter’s revenues or next year’s budget. You can focus more clearly on the growth and development of the organization in its service to its mission, not just its financial survival. Certainly this is true for non-profits that clearly don’t exist just to build up capital and income streams. Of course some for-profit companies really do exist to build themselves up financially. But even for many a for-profit company—it’s not size for size’ sake, nor revenue for revenue’s sake that is the reason to exist. Greater profits might come from scaling down.
Surely most institutions don’t want to lose sight of their missions, and fall into a pattern of preserving the beast at all costs. And I don’t think Harvard does either.
A special thanks to Ellen Miller a friend a colleague of my wife at Stonebridge Associates for pointing me to the Carey essay. I always learn something new from Ellen.
Image: apesara, via Flickr, cc 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!

Taking a lesson from baseball coaching

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Jeff McKay is a remarkable baseball coach who trains not just players, but alsCubs at Bato coaches. Jeff helps ball players by showing them how to be more aware of what they are doing.

Here’s an example of Jeff’s approach: Ricky is a baseball player and a great athlete. He is a power hitter—he hits a lot of home runs, but more often he strikes out.

In talking to Ricky, Jeff got him to realize that he’s impatient—he just wants to get a hit! He’ll swing at anything that comes in his direction. So Jeff simulated pitches in all possible places and got Ricky to think about just how far outside the strike zone he will swing. Part of that range, Ricky realized, was just too far out—he was unlikely to ever get a good hit.

Now, with a sharper awareness of his batting habits, Ricky can think about narrowing the range of pitches he’ll swing at, just a little. With that new awareness, Ricky will almost certainly hit the ball more often and strike out less.

You can get an organizational group to do something similar. For example, you can get people talking about the company’s tendencies to think certain ways. You can draw diagrams with your team of the company’s universe and what is inside in or outside it. Is that company strike zone too small?

You can build from that to an understanding of what the boundaries are on the group’s thinking—what topics do people talk about? What futures are they willing to imagine? Is that range sensible? Is the thinking too narrow? Are there official or strongly-felt boundaries on the team’s thinking?

Unlike Ricky—with a too-large strike zone, many organizations focus too narrowly—they need to be more aware of how they may swing at too few pitches because the organization’s thinking is too narrow.

You can play the coach’s role and help people focus on how the organization responds to change—what are its’ habits, good and bad. Somewhere in the range of possibility, the organization might learn better what pitches to swing at, and which ones to leave alone. As coach you can stop the action for a moment, and get people to reflect. Ask: What did we just do? Did we just dismiss that idea too abruptly? Why?

The key is to make people more aware of what they do, to get it out in the open, and be sure that those ways of thinking are the best fit for the organization as it faces the future.

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