future

Make Sense of Your (Unknown) Future

by Leave a Comment

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?

Next

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

by 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.

Next

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

by 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

by Leave a Comment

Source: VisualHunt

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.

WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE – Part 5 -PROBLEMs

by Leave a Comment

We posted COVID, STRATEGY, AND WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE a few weeks ago. Here are some further comments and observations about the fourth “known” — the proliferation of complex problems.

MindPrep Resource Center

Gee, about a year ago, things were simple. Put together a good strategy and ride it into the future. Sweet!

BAM! COVID-19! >>>>> Complex problems on the rise.

Pre-Covid problem resolution

In the “good ole days” (2019) most of our problems could be address singly. Expertise and experience could be applied because, as the T-shirt says, we’ve “been there and done that.”

  • PROBLEM? Know that a problem exists. Although problems should be “obvious,” that’s not always the case.
  • PROBLEM! Define the problem. Problems are often obscured by their symptoms. You need to look beyond the symptoms to find their cause. That’s where you’ll find the real problem.
  • P.R.O.B.L.E.M. Describe the problem with respect to its urgency, importance, clarity, complexity, and ownership.
  • STRATEGIES? Develop strategies to solve the problem. Except for the simplest of problems there are usually more than one way to resolve them.
  • STRATEGY! Select the best strategy. Use known and accepted criteria to evaluate all of the strategies and pick the best.
  • IMPLEMENT! Implement the strategy. What did your assessment tell you about your chances of success?
  • REVIEW! Review the results and improve your skills. Learning and improvement takes place using a rigorous after-action review process.

Post-Covid problem resolution complications

  • The “new normal” is slowly evolving. Do you describe the problem in the context of your old business or should you define the problem in the context of your reinvented business?
  • How urgent and important is the problem in a pandemic world. Can you even triage your suite of problems until a vaccine is on the horizon?
  • How many options are really available given the level of uncertainty? Will everything be built on a foundation of tentative assumptions?
  • Is there a “best” strategy to resolve the problem(s) or should you satisfice for the time being?

Advice while you wait for the new normal

Spend some quality “think time” focused on your business model and how you think it might evolve. Solve all big problems in the context of your evolving business model. Build a few scenarios and track them. For example, how does the problem look in a “shrink then grow” scenario? What about a “get acquired” scenario?

Assess every assumption you’ve made about business survival and success. What problem resolutions impact, or are impacted by, these assumptions. For example, what assumptions are you making about your workforce? About your customers?

Similar to using a Project Management Office to coordinate projects in your company, you might want to institute a Problem Resolution Team to integrate the efforts to resolve the big problems facing your company. Complex problems have dynamic interrelationships and few of your problems will stand alone. Take a systems approach.

We are in the process of revising our existing offering for Solving Complex Business Problems . That in itself is a complex problem. Wish is luck.

WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE – Part 4 – the need for speed

by 2 Comments

We posted COVID, STRATEGY, AND WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE a couple of weeks ago. Here are some further comments and observations about the third “known.”

MindPrep Resource Center

Gee, about a year ago, things were simple. Put together a good strategy and ride it into the future. Sweet!

BAM! COVID-19! >>>>> Move fast enough or become irrelevant.

What do you do when caught in an ambush? You move! And “which way” is a matter of judgment and luck. You can’t take the time to run a detailed analysis of options — you don’t have any time to spare.

What don’t you do when caught in an ambush? Stand still. If you do you’ll be dead.

You may not like the options for change open to you but you’ve been caught in the Covid ambush and have to act accordingly. You do know that something has to change. Or, more likely, many things have to change simultaneously.

Maybe you can fall back on your experience; but unless you’re a crisis expert you don’t have much relevant experience. Maybe you can convene a group of experts; but that takes time you don’t have.

What to do? Well, let me suggest something scary and radical. Describe the situation to your managers and let them tell you what to change. They have their “boots on the ground” so they see the real world. And, they are usually smarter than you think. They likely see options you don’t see and will know how to implement them without calling the consultants.

Will they (and you) make mistakes? Heck yes. But, if you are also agile you’ll recover from those mistakes and keep moving.

Remember, standing still (like waiting for a bailout) is NOT AN OPTION.

Learn from the past - deal with today - prepare for the future.

Download The Responsibilities Checklist Now

Our Company

What We Offer

Quick Links

Newsletter Sign-Up

© Copyright MindPrep Resource Center 2019. All Rights Reserved. Designed and Developed by Gloss
Solutions
Menu