John Mahaffie

5 foresight steps for dealing with community resistance to change

February 18, 2025March 7, 2017 by John B. Mahaffie

I recently met a couple who are leaders in their small Southern US town. They are not elected leaders. They are self-driven change makers. They are working hard and spending their own money to improve the town. They have planted thousands of flowers and created a festival to build town pride and draw visitors. They are planning new spaces for incubating creativity and businesses.

Their efforts reminded me of Carol Milford, the heroine in Sinclair Lewis' Main Street. She wanted to bring culture and sophistication to her adopted town. Like Carol Milford, my friends face tradition-minded, suspicious townspeople who don't understand their motives or vision for the community.

They are working for a better future for everyone, so why the pushback?

It's likely a combination of things. People are unsure or suspicious of the changes. Their instinct is it's better to have what you know than to chance it on unclear and outlandish new ideas. They don't know or share the vision of the couple who are leading change. So what do my friends need to do?

5 ways foresight can help

Sell their vision better. This means bringing clarity to their ideas about change and their motivations for pressing for it. They do so while respecting and celebrating the town's legacies, and the people who are a part of those. Appreciative inquiry is a technique for working with groups that starts with acknowledging strengths and positive legacies. It offers a starting point for a community (or organization) seeking to move forward cooperatively.
Join with stakeholders to explore a positive future. This means not claiming to have all the answers. Instead, invite community members to help forge plans. Community members with the strongest sense of "ownership" of the town should be allies, not opponents. Giving them participation in the process preserves their ownership. Some thoughts on dealing with people whose thinking is stuck in the present (or past) are here: "When only you see the future." Also, "difficult history" may be part of what my friends face in their town. See: "How to break free of difficult history."
Start the conversation by sharing assumptions about the future. Have participants in visioning meetings share their thoughts on "In 2027, I believe that ______________" . That view is at least 10 years in the future. Why? because that will help people jump past their immediate concerns and "today" objections. Probing this question does two things. 1). It gets the juices flowing, getting everyone's head in the future. 2). It surfaces assumptions about the future that we all carry and operate on whether we've told each other them or not. Sometimes the inability to move forward will be rooted in unexamined assumptions about the future. See: "In 20xx I believe that ________"
Do some unencumbered thinking. With stakeholders, explore the question: "What would we build today if none of this existed?" You don't do this because you plan to blot out everything and start over. This discussion allows people to imagine things not from the perspective of rigid, existing barriers that would make it hard to acheive them, but rather, from the point of view of what would be best. See also: "The clean slate scenario".
Build a clear vision of a desired future. Create 10- or 20-year views into the future. These scenarios could include stories about "what if we don't change" as well as views of positive futures. You can develop these scenarios with people from across the community. The scenarios will bring out clear and vivid images of the future. An artist's renderings of the future can further showcase the new ideas and enourage feedback. See also: "Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future".

Entering into processes like this is scary. But my new friends show only signs of excitement about it. They will make an even greater difference going forward, armed with some of the tools of foresight.

If you are working in a community or organization with these sorts of challenges, I can help you develop and lead a process to get further, more smoothly. Let me know if I can help: jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz and 202-271-0444.

What football can teach us about foresight

February 18, 2025January 7, 2010 by John B. Mahaffie

On December 27, 2009, during a pro football game between the until-then undefeated Indianapolis Colts and the New York Jets, Colts Head Coach Jim Caldwell pulled his starters, including the veteran quarterback Peyton Manning—a football megastar, from the game. The Colts were ahead, but barely. There was a lot of game left to play. The move drove fans nuts, creating a sports-blog furor and lots of Monday morning quarterbacking.

It was clear to me, as I watched the game with several strong-opinioned sports fans, that there were multiple, distinct points of view about this. And everyone, to a point, was right, and perhaps everyone was also wrong. It depended on your point of view and assumptions about what was at stake.

Some of the points of view:

Fans in the stadium—Short-term view. Paid a lot of money, and suffered cold weather and snow to go see the game, some surely in the main to see the star quarterback play.

Fantasy football fans and bettors—Short-term view. Surely counted utterly on the Peyton Manning and his team to win, and lost money because of the loss.

Second-strong players—Short-term view. may have been pleased at the chance to play and develop their skills, but suffered at the humiliation of poor results and a loss, all attributable the quarter and a half in which they played.

Head coach Caldwell and quarterback Manning—Long-term view. Focused on the playoffs and keeping Manning healthy for the only part of the season that truly matters.

New York Jets players and fans—Short-term view. Sure, they got a win, but they didn’t beat the best of the Indianapolis Colts.

And so on.

What does this tell us that is at all useful to foresight? First, it highlights a complex situation of conflicting near and long-term perspectives, and varying stakeholder points of view. That, in fact, is common across society and across the questions that matter to us most. It’s also at the root of many organizational decisions. Nevertheless, the fans in this case, and stakeholders in most cases, often forget that things are not black and white, and that there are long-term and short-term ways to weigh things.

And too often, those of opposing views think others are either stupid, or evil in their actions. I worked hard to try (I failed) to convince some I was with that Coach Caldwell was not making a “mistake,” just taking an action they didn’t agree with, or wished he wouldn’t. It was not a blunder. He did it on purpose, with forethought, and with the knowledge of quarterback Manning and agreement of the team owner.

Looking at sports can help us think about big questions and can improve our foresight. Perhaps most usefully, there are regularly situations in popular sports like this, and lots of people will know about and understand the situations. You can use them to illustrate points you may need to make about different points of view in your work and decisionmaking. This is especially true of weighing near and long-term goals, and also valuable in contrasting different stakeholder perspectives. Sports are also a safer topic (usually) than some of the most pressing and distressing organizational or societal questions. You can use a good story from the sports world to highlight differences of stakeholders, differing assumptions, and the short-term versus the long-term.

Image: www.usmc.mil

Thoughts on Why?

February 18, 2025September 2, 2008 by John B. Mahaffie

Why? by Charles Tilly Just because your careful, reasoned look at the future makes a decision or conclusion clear to you, doesn’t mean everyone else will “get” your reasoning. When you have grasped how things are changing, and decided what should be done that is new and different, you still have to explain your thinking to others.

It’s hard to make change without doing that, and there are some good ways of understanding what kinds of explanations might work. Charles Tilly’s Why? (2006) explains how we explain things, and is a good framing for people trying to get others to understand the basis for conclusions and decisions about the future.

Tilly describes four ways we answer the question Why? Let me use a story from my family to show what each one is about.

A couple of years ago, we decided to dismantle a wooden swing set in our backyard to make room for an addition to the house. At the time, one of our boys was about 7 years old, and he was the key stakeholder in this decision. He was the one who would ask Why?

As I used a crowbar to dismantle the swing set, while my son was out for the day, I tried out Tilly’s four kinds of explanations in my mind. Here they are with my thinking ab out what I would tell my son:

Conventions–Connect the decision to common practice, what others are doing, the social, business, societal norms. In my case I framed it as: “You’re a big boy now, big boys don’t play on swing sets”
Stories—Use a story to explain the situation, put the decision in a context familiar to the ones you are explaining it to. My approach: “Remember how we’ve been talking about building a climbing wall up to the tree house?”
Codes—Frame the decision as essential to legal requirements, social norms, rules, etc. My framing: “If this were a public park, the swing set would not meet safety requirements, and we’d be told to take it down”
Technical accounts—Explain the decision technically, with the technical details making the case for a change. My technical explanation: “The pressure treated wood has gotten splintered and rotted, and isn’t safe anymore”

In my work with Jennifer Jarratt, we’ve increasingly recognized the value and power of stories. This certainly carries over to explaining the reasoning behind changes that are often scary for people. But stories are not the only thing to reach for. Of the four kinds of explanations, your situation may dictate what you use and perhaps what combination you use. On my decision, I used the story approach, using it to show my son the promise of something better.

It’s critical to remember your audiences when you explore how best to explain things. What we’ve found over 20+ years helping people explore the future is that we often start our efforts with a technical group, one that’s happy and comfortable in having technical explanations for things. The problem arises when they see their stakeholders and ultimately the public as most easily swayed by a technical explanation. For a young boy, at least, the technical explanation would have failed, led to tears, in fact.

Of the four, I am tempted to say that conventions is the weakest, but we have to remember that lots of people, even lots of business executives, have times when they want to follow the norms, and not take big risks or strike out on their own. Conventions may be quite compelling to them. For a 7-year-old, saying “you are a big boy now” rings hollow. He felt like a little boy, and couldn’t imagine life without his swing set.

Codes are important too, because they tend to be fixed requirements. You are not usually in position to change them. But they are not sufficient explanations to really energize people to get them on board for doing something new. Our son didn’t, of course, care about codes, about the law, and so on. He just wanted to have a place to play.

In the end we built a great climbing wall up to the tree house. The decision made sense to the critical stakeholder. The future didn’t look scary or arbitrary.