strategymaking

8 things leaders should know about strategic foresight

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Today’s leaders are pressed to focus on strategic foresight and many are responding. But it’s not always clear what strategic foresight means. What do leaders need to know?

  1. It has to be long term. For true clarity on your future, you need a view that goes at least five or ten years out. You need to see past immediate concerns and explore and envision real change. See: The short-term view and the long-term view
  2. There are no “answers.” The future is uncertain, with a range of potential outcomes. So strategic foresight doesn’t mean prediction, it means clarifying patterns of change and modeling potential outcomes and choices. See: Foresight illustrated: The mother of all futures diagrams
  3. You have to look beyond your usual domain. New challenges and undiscovered opportunities will often come from outside your sector or market. See: All futures are global
  4. You need to reach beyond the low-hanging fruit. The actions you can take now to fix things and keep going are obvious, whether or not you are able to accomplish them. They are the low-hanging fruit. Addressing bigger challenges and opportunities, and forging a successful future, means reaching beyond the low-hanging fruit to bigger systems that will need to change. See: Making change beyond the low-hanging fruit
  5. The foresight process itself is valuable. Wider participation in the processes of strategic foresight strengthens organizational foresight, agility, and learning. You need others’ inputs, and you need others to be a part of innovation and decisionmaking. And everyone benefits from the time spent learning, exploring, and imagining. See: Noun=bad, verb=good and Planning, scanning, forecasting—it’s the verb not the noun
  6. You must confront unpleasant truths, not just hopes and dreams. That means “what ifs” that include catastrophic or transformational change. From those scenarios can come fresh thinking about a positive path forward. See: The unspoken scenario
  7. Success means forging a culture of foresight. Strategic foresight can’t be a once-in-a-while activity. Organizational habits of mind and action should stand on a base of clear and regular thinking about the future. See: What is a foresight culture? and The characteristics of a foresightful organization
  8. The future is yours to shape. Finally, the future is not inevitable. You can and must shape it yourself. Don’t wait for it to happen to you. See: Don’t be a victim of change

My work is all about helping leaders do these things. Let me know if I can shed more light on this, or help you kick your efforts up to a new level. Jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz and 202-271-0444 More about my work is at www.leadingfuturists.biz.

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.

As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder

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A lot my after-hours life is centered on baseball this time of year, so allow me to look for a strong lesson for the business world from my favorite sport.

Baseball today is much the same game that was played over 100 years ago. It has deeply-rooted conventions and established ways of doing things. [link] And it’s slow to change. There are tremendous pressures not to break the bounds of common practice in baseball. A ruled error for a player in baseball means not achieving something that, conventionally played, should have been doable. In fact, sometimes a fielder who misses a ball gets no error because he doesn’t try to make a tough play.

As baseball stats guru Bill James has noted, “A blunder by a manager is a move that is A) unconventional, B) doesn’t work and C) occurs at a moment of focus in the game. If you put those three things together, you have a blunder. As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder.”

The disincentive to innovation in baseball, like in so many areas of life, is powerful. That means a lot of potentially-successful and innovative approaches to the game will not even get a tryout.

For example, conventional practice has the best pitchers go in as starting pitchers, at the beginning of the game. Late game, a series of relievers come in to finish the pitching. Some innovative thinkers in baseball management would love to try starting the aces in the third or fourth inning, using the one-inning talent first. The potential in that is great for having the best arms hold on to a win or help the team come from behind. But starting the aces late would be odd and unconventional, and no one wants to try it (and fail).

The few baseball managers who show a tendency to “think outside the box” are the exceptions that prove the rule. For example, in April 2008, Bobby Cox, the Atlanta Braves manager, temporarily moved his pitcher to left field so he could bring him back to the mound later. The Braves lost, but fortunately Bobby Cox has the status in baseball to avoid his unconventional move being seen as a terrible blunder. Still, the baseball bloggers and other commentators reacted as if a crazy-like-a-fox manager had done something truly odd. But what he did was logical, legal, sensible, and could have worked.

We need the leaders in organizations to feel empowered to buck convention, to try new things, and to fail sometimes. Baseball managers, with their ancient game of traditions, are starting to wake up to new ideas. Are business people caught in their old trap of sticking to convention?

Many are. We need to do some careful reflection on how much that’s true and get conversations going about it. If more people are aware of how traditions and conventions in their game might be inhibiting them, we’ll have a clearer shot at making the changes that need making, and maybe we can win more games.

Image: bobbychuck24 via Flickr, cc license

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