Looking in the rearview mirror is not enough.
When you drive your car where do your spend most of your time looking?
Rearview? Straight ahead? Navigation map?
If you're like me you spend most of the time looking forward at the road ahead, scanning for obstacles, making sure you are heading in the right direction, assessing conditions, with occasional glances in the rear-view or at the navigation. Most of the time I'm focused on where I am heading, getting ready for what might happen next.
What about at work with your business - as you drive towards impact and future growth? Where do you spend most of your thinking time? Reviewing the past? Scanning forward for what might happen next? Dealing with today's urgent issues?
Chances are you spend most of your time reviewing the past to try and make sense of the future, dealing with immediate issues, or wading through today's data to make sure you are on track or to try and spot any immediate problems to fix. You probably spend very little time looking forward. Even when you can spare the time for forward scanning you know that it's still not enough.
If you could change where you spent most of your business thinking time where would you choose?
Past? Present? Futures?
Why?
As an experienced business leader you know intuitively that if you spent more time thinking, planning, and decision making with a forward long-term focus, you will deliver results with more confidence and greater reliability. Instead, the rapidly changing, highly uncertain world conspires to pull you into a short-term, problem-solving spiral that keeps you incredibly busy, but less effective than you want.
Forecast and foresight.
In most sectors of business, highly precise long-range forecasting is not feasible due to the high level of uncertainty that exists. Data points readily available from within the business and externally may prove useful in static market situations. However, in rapidly changing situations, past data is insufficient for planning.
It's very common for businesses to use accounting, competitor, financial, market share, and consumer data to make short-term supply plans, commit to production and service delivery schedules, design new products, allocate resources, and make staffing decisions. While these data sources are accurate, it needs to be more broadly acknowledged that historical data is an inaccurate predictor of what might happen next.
Foresight isn't meant to be a substitute for historical data-driven forecasting. Rather, foresight is useful in managerial planning when the pace of change makes historical data unreliable as a predictor of future behavior. Foresight is about thinking 5-10 years ahead and making decisions today. It involves the use of a variety of robust tools and processes to develop a vision of possible, probable, and preferred futures, allowing leaders to plan and make decisions with more confidence and greater reliability.
Foresight, in an organisational setting, differs from strategic thinking — it's more creative and inventive, taking into account a wider range of potential outcomes. Foresight also has an action-oriented component that strategic thinking doesn't require. Foresight supports a bias for action in planning and decision-making helping leaders become comfortable with their ability to anticipate what might happen next and take action accordingly.
Thinking 5-10 years ahead.
In a world of 1-3 year plans, foresight supports you to think 5-10 years ahead to make decisions today. Foresight helps you to:
Develop a compelling vision of future possibilities, involving your entire organisation and key stakeholders in creating an imaginative yet reliable picture of the world in which you want to thrive.
Think more strategically then competitors about things that might happen next using scenarios to identify opportunities and threats early on when it's still possible to proactively respond.
Anticipate and respond to unwelcome surprises before they happen, which helps you stay a step ahead of competitors by proactively planning for the future when it's still possible to influence outcomes.
In an uncertain world, foresight doesn't suggest that long-range forecasting is obsolete or unnecessary—far from it. Rather, it is about thinking 5-10 years ahead and making decisions today in an uncertain world where data points readily available from within the business may only prove useful in static market situations.
What's changing?
We know change is happening but how do we get a view on how those changes will develop over time? What are the drivers of change? What are the consequences of those changes? We have to think about what's changing in our business, industry, market, and society, and work out how those changes will influence what happens next.
Type of changes that occur are:
Points of inflection - Also called "tipping points" occur when an existing trend reaches a critical level and accelerates to a significant and often unstoppable level and change occurs. They can have a positive or negative impact.
Trends - Trends can be identified because they start to show up more frequently and more intensely over time. Trends are not necessarily tied to economic, demographic, or other quantitative factors. Trends are often observable in people's behaviours, mind-sets, or sentiments.
Drivers - When you combine two or more trends, it's called a driver. Drivers are the things that are directly impacting the world in which you operate.
Contradictions - These are points of tension in the changing landscape. When you put two trends together to get a result, and they seem to be driving in opposite directions, it's called a contradiction.
Weak signals - These are indications of change, and they're not powerful enough to drive change too much as yet. They provide a warning sign of what could be a larger phenomenon emerging.
Bringing the outside in.
The foresight process, particularly the futures tools used in it, offers insights into the external forces that may be shaping your business environment. When using these tools, you pay attention to how the world around you is changing and then use this information as a guide for action. Foresight is about "bringing the outside in" because it uses external information on what's happening in society, technology, economy, environment, and politics to inform your plans.
Create the pull.
The pull of futures is created by the process of exploring possible scenarios, imagining how your business could look in 5-10 years from now, and considering what you need to do today to achieve your preferred future.
Foresight is also useful in helping you to think about what you would like to see happen in the future, not just what might happen. You want to avoid falling into a habit of only thinking about change that happens to your organisation, outside of your control. You should also proactively direct the business conversation towards your desired outcomes. You often have more control and influence over what happens next than you give yourself credit for.
Many leaders are afraid to talk about possible futures because they don't have a clear sense of how they can impact them. A future that is influenced by your actions is still uncertain, but not as difficult to imagine or embrace as one that is completely independent of what you do today.
Be ready for what's next.
Using foresight to get comfortable with what might happen next, to build plans that anticipate what to do as futures emerge, and to take actions today that influence what futures occur is a critical business skill.
Your foresight to-do list should include:
Don't fear futures; take charge and influence them.
Think about what the futures could be and how you want to shape them. Be proactive and plan for different scenarios.
Be aware of events that may impact your business. Monitor trends, drivers, and even contradictions so you have a good sense of what might happen next.
Bring the outside inside your company to be able to better prepare for where futures are heading.
Think 5-10 years ahead and make decisions today.
