strategy and leadership

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!

_________

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

Deep down, it’s about thinking differently

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“A professional futurist is a person who studies the future in order to help people understand, anticipate, prepare for and gain advantage from coming changes.  It is not the goal of a futurist to predict what will happen in the future.  The futurist uses foresight to describe what could happen in the future and, in some cases, what should happen in the future.” — Association of Professional Futurists

That’s a good definition, rooted, as you’d expect, in considerations of the future. And it nicely characterizes what I do. But what’s even more fundamental about my work is getting people to think differently.

When I work with groups to help them explore change, what I realize is how much they already know, at least about the near-term future. But their view is too narrow. They need help: advice, tools, an independent pair of eyes, to see past the immediate, change their perspective, and get somewhere new. They need to think differently.

Foresight is a superb capability. It jumps your thinking beyond what’s in your inbox, beyond what’s going on today that is soaking up your time and attention. It opens up a space to anticipate change, and to do so with colleagues.

But that fresh thinking needn’t only be about the future. Opening a door and looking out, encountering something new, even in the here and now, is already transformational. Of course, foresight helps. It keeps you from falling back into narrower thinking patterns. It helps makes sure you think differently.

7 Deadly sins of foresight

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1. Ignoring the future (You let today's concerns give you an excuse to not focus on the future) [See: Keep an eye on the future while righting the ship].

2. Shortsightedness (You only think a few years into the future) [See: The foresight gap: what too many organizations get wrong]

3. Mistaking the present for the future (You mistake fixing things and catching up with today for being future-focused) [See: If you're only keeping up you're probably going backwards]

4. Narrowness (You fail to realize your future will be shaped by a much larger one which you need to understand) [See: Foresight illustrated: choosing how broad a view to take while exploring the future]

5. All else held equal (You let your attention focus on just one change, and assume everything else stays the same) [A solution is to use scenarios– fleshed out views of the future — to make sure you explore how multiple changes will unfold. See: Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future] 

6. Lack of vision (You have not thought through nor communicated the future you want or expect) [See: You can't be what you can't see]

7. Deafness (You don't listen to others, or pay attention to signals of change) [See: Talk to the frog]

For more on pitfalls and "deadly sins" for foresight see: 13 mistakes you make when exploring the future

For good habits in foresight that can fight these sins, see:  27 habits of highly effective futurists

Image: detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The seven deadly sins and the four last things, circa 1500. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.

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.

Foresight helps you see the forest for the trees

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LeavesTreesForestWorldYou sit at your computer, productive, focused, dedicated to your work. You engage the detailed specifics of your job, the numbers, the facts, the personnel, the movement of things. You are an expert. You can tell when things are right and wrong. The organization rewards you for your knowledge and skill. You get things right. You are proud of your knowledge, skill, and focus. But you may be missing the future.

    Expert knowledge can put blinders on you 

It's hard to see the forest for the trees or you may have fallen out of the habit. I see this with people I meet in organizations. They can be savvy outside work and un-thoughtful or un-critical inside.

The job does it to them. The overburden of work and sometimes the corporate culture, squeezes them into a narrow place. So can a sense of the special role of their profession. Sometimes I hear people say they had read about an interesting trend or technology in the news or saw it in their travels, but it didn't occur ot them to think about how it might relate to their work. Too often their workplace doesn't encourage them to bring such observations into their what they do. 

A specialist's tight focus can blind you to the bigger picture. It can dim your view of new demands and opportunities from outside the system. And yet it may be, officially, your job to have that tight focus. It's also true that ideas about "how our business works" and "this is our mission" may be nearsighted for the evolving global reality that is shaping your destiny.

We all should be scouts, out in the world encountering change and clues to the future. If we can build and reinforce the habit of bringing those insights into our work our organizations will be better off. And with that, we should keep our focus broad, see the whole forest, not just the trees. 

Foresight tools bring a payoff by widening the view (as well as deepening it into the future). Most change is from the outside. Foresight tools are for making the whole forest visible to people whose eyes are on the trees, or even only the leaves. 

Those tools include:
+Environmental scanning 
+Scenario development
+Systems mapping

Each is a big(ger) picture mechanism. Each has been a powerful tool I've used with my clients over the years. They end up sharper, clearer-minded, aware, and more foresightful.

Please let me know if I can help you and your team to explore a wider world of change that will be a part of your destiny: jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz and 202-272-0444.

Images: Aidan Grey, Joshua Mayer, Beatrice Murch, via Flickr, Creative Commons ShareAlike license. NASA.

The foresight gap: What too many organizations get wrong

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6THBusinesses aim close. Too often, a business’s view stays on its current realities and where the business is excelling or struggling. The mindset is near-term and management aligns its tools to support that near-term view. This creates a gulf between the challenges and opportunities of the future and the demands of the status quo. It is a foresight gap.

The problem is endemic. Business rewards executives for improving the current business model and processes, but too rarely for charting a smart future course. Businesses measure results with tools which lock them in to present-focused, incremental improvement. That leaves out positive action around change that will shape their destiny in the longer term.

Ideas and behavior around risk create the foresight gap. Baseball offers an analogy. Sometimes a ballplayer who tries to do something hard, like catching a ball that requires him to lunge far to one side, fails at his attempt. The umpires give him an error for not catching the ball. Another, less risk-taking player might not try for the tough catch at all, letting it go by. And then the umpires may not award an error, presuming the ball was un-catchable. The game punishes risk taking and rewards risk avoidance. Business is like that.

As in baseball, businesses tend to punish risk takers when things do not work out. But they reward executives who stay the course. And though staying the course is a poor futures strategy, the business considers taking a longer-term view to be a move into uncertain and risky ground. The business instinct is to pull back from that longer view. Thus the rewards and measures of success are misaligned.

The foresight gap is rooted in these ingrained habits. But it is also true that business leaders often do not know enough about how to look at the future, nor what to do about what they see on their five-, ten-, or twenty-year horizon. That incomplete knowledge leaves them not understanding what foresight is, how to use it, and what to expect from it.

We need to adjust three critical factors to close the foresight gap:

First, we need to encourage a longer view. The conversation in any organization should sometimes be about five, ten, and twenty years hence. That does not leave behind the present and its tactical needs. But it begins to connect the organization’s longer-term success with present action. The future view gives present action a direction other than simple continuity, and it helps business reevaluate, at intervals, its present course.

And what is that future view like? It is an understanding of a range of possibility which must be less sure the further into the future the business looks. But uncertainty about that future should not shut down a consideration of the possibilities.

Second, a business needs to recognize the executives who take a longer-term view for their wisdom, and not put them under suspicion for embracing what is uncertain or unpredictable. Business needs to get comfortable with acting without complete certainty; it is not possible to make good strategy otherwise. The executive who thinks about the future should get validation and the ear of colleagues. But better still; develop the instinct for the long-term view across the leadership of the organization.

Third, the organization needs to get good at monitoring, interpreting, and responding to change. Any organization has a radar screen. That screen by default shows the things that are obvious and clear for the organization: its operations, constituencies, markets, partners and allies, customers, etc. The executive who attends the sector’s conferences, reads the sector’s newsletters, and so on looks like a good leader. But there is a second radar screen that represents the long view and the future success of the organization, and too few organizations have one. That second screen shows future social, economic, and technological changes that have not yet impacted the organization, but will.

Closing the foresight gap means establishing that second radar screen. It means opening up thinking to allow in things that are not yet shaping the business. It means letting in speculative views of possibilities, even when they do not match current thinking and current understanding of the sector or marketplace the organization plays in. Some part of strategic thinking will always be conjecture, and some part of it will always be rooted in a range of possibilities without the surety of prediction.

The foresight gap needs closing, and smart organizations will work to close it by getting smarter about the future, but also by loosening the tight reins they hold on themselves and their leaders. And those organizations will be the ones that win in the long term.

Image: Cathy T, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License.

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

Ask the hard questions

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

Your future in questionOnce 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

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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

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

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