future

Act and Intercept Your (Unknown) Future

December 13, 2020 by Bill Welter Leave a Comment

This is a continuation of our posts about preparing for the future. It offers three questions about executing the decisions you will make to meet your future.

Today is yesterday’s future. What did you learn?

Let me be blunt — we, collectively, are terrible at executing projects. Lots of reasons, lots of excuses, but not a lot of well executed projects. And one of our big shortcomings is our unwillingness to learn from the results of the programs and projects we launch to get to the future.

We plan, we execute, we make mistakes, and then when the project if “finally finished” we drop it and get on to the next. No organizational learning takes place.

Sound familiar? I think it might. I’ve been involved with organizations for over fifty years and I have yet to hear any leader brag that projects in their unit/company/team are always on time, on budget and deliver full-scope, quality outcomes. Never.

Why is this so important? Because the pattern will persist.

If we want a better future we need to get better at today’s decision, actions, and projects. We need to learn from our successes and failure and then DO something.

Do you have the capabilities you need?

Here’s a question: Will the capabilities that got you and your team to today get you to tomorrow?

Here’s the answer: NO

Sure, some of today’s capabilities will be needed and will be useful. But others will be obsolete. And still others will be needed, but absent.

Develop your vision of the future and work backwards. What must you be able to do to make the future real?

And note that knowledge, although important, is not enough. For example, I know a lot about sinus surgery; but you would not want me operating on your nose. You may know a lot about how other companies have used “big data,” but that does not mean you are capable of important data-based decisions.

If we want a better future we need to build capabilities that will be needed to get us there. Learning should be future-oriented.

What took you so long to act?

All of us have four overarching responsibilities as we try to intercept our future.

We need to sense the signals of tomorrow. We need to make sense of these signals. We need to decide on a course of action. And we need to act on these decisions. These four responsibilities depict a cycle, as shown in the graphic above.

This cycle, the Sense-Response Cycle, has to run at least as fast as your industry is evolving. If not, you become irrelevant. And that means that each responsibility has to be performed at the pace of industry evolution. Bottom line? You have to be good at executing each of the responsibilities.

Look at your weaknesses and get better. Either that, or become irrelevant. It’s your choice.

Coming in 2021

The Future is Coming: Don’t be Taken by Surprise — A new course coming in 2021

We will launch a pilot in January. Like our recently competed pilot, The Pragmatic Strategist, this course will be a high-tech / high-touch hybrid of reading, videos, group discussions (via Zoom) and workbook exercises. I’ll announce the topics and details soon.

Reach out if you want to get on our list for the pilot or if you’d like a copy of our recent whitepaper describing the context and focus of the course. The pilot is not free, but the discount is significant.

Decide and Meet Your (Unknown) Future

December 6, 2020 by Bill Welter Leave a Comment

This is a continuation of our posts about preparing for the future. It offers three questions about decisions you will make to meet your future.

What does the future of present decisions look like?

The late management sage, Peter Drucker, wrote “Strategic planning does not deal with future decisions, It deals with the futurity of present decisions.” What you do today will play out, for better or worse, in the future.

For example, the decades of past decisions companies have made focused on efficiency left many organizations too fragile to absorb disruptions to supply chain or too weak to prevent damage from a cyber-attack. Effectiveness suffered because of efficiency-focus decisions.

Or consider the problems associated with the student loan “industry.” For good and bad reasons young people made decisions to accept student loans. The “futurity” of those past decisions are haunting many of them today.

Take a look at a personal or organizational impending decision and think about the chain of intended and unintended consequences and the consequences of those consequences. How smart might your decision look in three to five years?

What are you afraid of?

Fear is demonstrated in our personal and organizational attitudes about risk.

Risk is a reality of organizational life and many organizations are risk-adverse to the point of paralysis. C-level execs are afraid of damaging stock price. Managers are afraid of making a mistake and damaging their career prospects. Or, they hear the call for more risk-taking, but realize that their bonus depends on short-term goal achievement, not long-term success.

The future is a scary place. As we look into the future we see many unknown and unknowable scenarios. So we tread lightly and move slowly.

And that’s when entrepreneurs make a move and surprise industry giants. Today we worry that Amazon is going to totally dominate the retail world or upset the pharmacy dominance of Walgreens and CVS. I’m old enough to remember when they were nothing more than an upstart online bookseller.

What are you afraid of? What should you be afraid of?

Who owns your future?

The obvious answer to the question is “You, of course.” But be honest. Nobody or no thing owns you, but they might own your future. Have you unwittingly “mortgaged” your future to the point where someone else really owns it?

Are you in a job that’s taking you into a dead-end future?

Has your organization focused too much on past success and its future is really owned by an upstart competitor?

Is your future owned by your credit card?

What decisions do you need to make today to “buy back” your future or the future of your organization?

Seeing, thinking and deciding are fine, but only action will get you to the future. Unfortunately, in my 50+ years of work I’ve never come across an organization that bragged that their projects were always on-time, on-budget, and produced full-scope, quality outcomes. I’ll post another “episode” of the Sense-Response Cycle in a few days. Stay tuned.

Coming in 2021

We will launch a pilot course in January focused on helping managers and professionals be better prepared for their future. Like our recently competed pilot, The Pragmatic Strategist, this course will be a high-tech / high-touch hybrid of reading, videos, group discussions (via Zoom) and workbook exercises.

Reach out if you want to get on our list for the pilot. It’s not free, but the discount is significant. I’ll announce the topics and format soon.

Make Sense of Your (Unknown) Future

November 28, 2020 by Bill Welter 2 Comments

This is a continuation of our November 22nd post and it offers three questions about making sense of the signals you’ve seen.

Who sees a different future than you, and why?

Some of us look to the future and see opportunity. Others see doom and gloom. The issue is not about who is right and who is wrong. Rather, the issue is found in why we differ. We often need to have a conversation (a “real” debate) and dig into underlying assumptions and models of the future. Facts are facts — interpretations differ.

Who sees a different future than you and why?

Can you see multiple futures?

The clues that we sense on the edge of our mental radar screen can be interpreted in a number of ways because we interpret these clues in the context of our history, existing knowledge and personal desires. Some clues lead us to a probable or possible future. But there is another future we should consider.

President Kennedy looked at the clues about the Soviet and U.S. space capabilities in the early 1960s and stated a preferred future. And we started chasing that future all the way to the moon. Clues are not destiny. They are just clues.

What do you know about the future? What do you suspect? What do you want?

What don’t you know that you should?

Winston Churchill was concerned with, and responsible for, the future of England during the Second World War. He was constantly searching for clues about the future of the war and England’s survival. But as mentioned above, clues have to be incorporated with existing knowledge as you attempt to make sense of what you are seeing.

He was concerned that people would assume he had knowledge that he might not have. Consequently, he often started strategy meetings with a very basic question — “What don’t I know that I should.”

Make this personal. What don’t you know about your future that you should?

Once you’ve sensed the clues of the future and made sense of them you need to decide on a course of action. Otherwise nothing moves you toward the future with some sense of control. I’ll post another “episode” of the Sense-Response Cycle in a few days. Stay tuned.

Coming in 2021

We will launch a pilot course in January focused on helping managers and professionals be better prepared for their future. Like our recently competed pilot, The Pragmatic Strategist, this course will be a hybrid of reading, videos, group discussions (via Zoom) and workbook exercises.

Sense Your (Unknown) Future

November 22, 2020 by Bill Welter Leave a Comment

Apply the Sense-Response Cycle to the Future

This is a continuation of our November 18th post and it offers one comment and two questions about preparing for the future by sensing the signals of your future.

Look for the future before it finds you

If you wait passively for the future you will become a victim of competitor intention and the vagaries of nature and the ecosystem in which you operate.

Spend time and energy looking for trends that are irreversible and significant. For example, some people saw housing, mortgage, and risk-shifting trends and made money in the 2008 financial meltdown. Others “went along for the ride” and lost everything.

Look for clues. For example, Gen Z (oldest about 23 years old) don’t like mutual funds but love Robinhood. I wonder what financial service firms will have to do in the coming years. Clues are out there, but you have to look for them.

Does your future already exist somewhere else?

Sometimes we can sense the future by getting our of our geocentric bubble and thinking globally.

For example, we can see some of the future of banking by looking at smartphone use for finance in Africa.

We, collectively, missed the impact of Covid-19 but could have seen it by paying more attention to China. Or, we could have seen clues for handling pandemics by looking to Africa and how they handled Ebola and SARS.

What is your DEW Line looking for?

Here’s a bit of a history lesson for my younger readers. During the Cold War the relations between the United Stated and the Soviet Union were, shall we say, not good. We had aircraft capable of carrying nuclear bombs and so did the Soviets.

So, starting in 1954 we constructed a line of radar stations along our northern border and in Canada that were pointed north. Why? Because the shortest distance between the two countries was over the North Pole. We wanted as much warning as possible if “they” were going to bomb us.

The radar stations were not pointed east or west or south. They were pointed toward perceived “danger.”

So, think about you and your organization and consider the dangers in your future. That will give you an indication of what you should watch for. (You probably already do this if you get an annual physical. Most of those tests are to give you an early earning of health problems.) Now, do the same thing for your job and your organization.

Once you’ve sensed the clues of the future you need to make sense of them. I’ll post another “episode” of the Sense-Response Cycle in a few days. Stay tuned.

Coming in 2021

We will launch a pilot course in January focused on helping managers and professionals be better prepared for their future. Like our recently competed pilot, The Pragmatic Strategist, this course will be a hybrid of reading, videos, group discussions (via Zoom) and workbook exercises.

Prepare for Your (Unknown) Future

November 18, 2020 by Bill Welter Leave a Comment

A Dozen Comments and Questions

All of us are reeling from the impact of Covid-19 on our industry, business, and lives. This pandemic is an event that none of us were prepared for (although it was predicted) and hope to never face again.

However, Covid-19 is only the latest (although nastiest) surprise we have faced and certainly not the last we will face. The future keeps sneaking-up on us and we often find ourselves unprepared.

Think not? Consider the following examples of “unpreparedness.”

Was the U.S. auto industry prepared for the Japanese auto companies and their emphasis on quality?
Was Motorola prepared for Nokia and was Nokia prepared for Apple?
Were the department stores prepared for Amazon?
Were newspapers prepared for social media?

We, collectively, need to be better prepared for our sometimes-unknown, but often-ignored, futures.

I’ll examine the four parts of the cycle shown above in the coming week. By the way, the “D.E.W Line” is an artifact of the cold war. Stay tuned, I’ll explain.

We will launch a pilot course in January focused on helping managers and professionals be better prepared for their future. Like our recently competed pilot, The Pragmatic Strategist, this course will be a hybrid of reading, videos, group discussions (via Zoom) and workbook exercises.

Preparing for a New Future

November 11, 2020 by Bill Welter Leave a Comment

In 2006 Jean Egmon and I wrote The Prepared Mind of a Leader. The book was triggered by Louis Pasteur’s oft-misquoted admonition that “chance favors a prepared mind” and Joseph Schumpeter’s observations about creative destruction.

The book was based on observations and research into people who were, or were not, prepared for their future. We identified eight skills that seemed and still seem obvious and yet some were not consistently used by leaders and their organizations.

The skills are listed below but I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that “we” underutilize the skills of imagining, challenging and reflecting. This observation is based on thousands of businesspeople I’ve talked with over the past fourteen years in workshops I’ve facilitated globally.

So, here we are getting ready to closeout a crummy year and the question of “How should we prepare for the future?” is on everyone’s mind.

My partners and I are in the process of developing a workshop for our Pragmatic Leadership series which we will pilot early in 2021. Here are a couple of tidbits.

The hare will beat the tortoise

Every leader of every organization has four responsibilities that form a cycle we refer to as the Sense-Response Cycle™. You need to:

Sense the signals of change
Make sense of these signals considering your vision, values, and goals
Decide on a course of action
Execute your decisions effectively and learn.

This four-part cycle must run “fast enough”, or you and your organization become irrelevant! And considering the turmoil in every industry, the cycle will have to be run faster than ever before. Remember, this is a cycle and if you’re slow in addressing any one of the four responsibilities, the whole cycle will suffer.

Use ALL eight skills

Here are a few simple thoughts. More to come.

OBSERVE: Consider your mental radar screen. What’s on the edge and moving in fast? And think in “bigger boxes.” How is the larger world changing?

IMAGINE: Do some purposeful daydreaming and play some “what-if” games. What if some form of social distancing was permanent? What if you had to start your business again with new customers and new suppliers?

REASON: Put ideology and emotion to the side (as much as you can) and try to build conclusions about needed business changes that are based on valid assumptions, good data, and a coherent set of premises that, together, lead you and your team to valid, sound conclusion.

REFLECT: This is the time to be tough on yourself. Avoid playing the victim because you’re not. Business disruption is a fact of life – so why were you so surprised by the pandemic? Seriously, what did you miss and why did you miss it? Sure, you’re not an epidemiologist but did you wait too long to make a move? Be brutally honest here.

CHALLENGE: You and your organization have spent a LOT of time and energy focusing on efficiency over the past decades. What has to change to shift to effectiveness?

DECIDE: It may be time for decision-triage. You’ve been ambushed by the pandemic and you have to move. What decisions do you need to make now and how much risk can you tolerate? Note that risk adverse organizations tend to be slow. Remember, for the time being the hare will win.

LEARN: Play this game with yourself – pretend it’s 2025 and you’re conducting a “Reverse SWOT analysis.” Look back from the imagined future and list the strengths you should have had, the weaknesses you should have overcome, the opportunities you ignored and the threats you should have resolved. This will give you the foundation for a pragmatic learning plan.

ENABLE: You are not alone on this journey into the future. What knowledge, means and opportunities do your teammates need? Help them so they can help you.

As mentioned above, the skills of imagining, reflecting, and challenging are often underutilized. We need them more than ever.

The pilot will be offered at a significant discount. Let me know if you’re interested in participating.

future

Act and Intercept Your (Unknown) Future