Foresight for our futures.
All our knowledge is about the past and all our decisions are about the future. When it comes to modern leadership, acknowledging all our skills and experiences, our years on the job, our intelligence and know how, we are all working in the space of not knowing. Right now, we are the first people to work in 2021, and no one has worked in 2022 before.
Business as usual only works when the world is stable. To prepare for the challenges ahead, we need to balance our knowledge from the past, with our vision and needs for the future. There is lots of data from the past, little data about the future, and traditionally we have relied heavily on past data sources to support our decisions.
To improve the efficacy of our decision-making, we need to get better at using foresight. We need to actively build the capacity and capability for our organisations to vision and plan around possible, probable and preferred futures.
Plans change as they meet reality. We can make our plans more robust to adapt as reality appears. We can:
Anticipate emerging trends and issues for use in today’s decisions.
Better balance the known, with the unknown, in our planning.
Improve the return from our investments.
Shift our focus from day-to-day management towards longer term opportunities.
Improve risk management by reducing blind spots and becoming better prepared for a range of futures.
Feel greater comfort with resource allocation decisions for impact and growth.
We need to become more foresight focused by updating the sources of data we rely on for planning.
