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For Bob Johansen, get there early means seeing a possible future in time to act on it now, before others do. For a corporation, getting there early could mean finding new markets or creating new products before its competitors. For a nonprofit, it could mean anticipating emerging issues that will affect clients and stakeholders before others with different agendas stake out their positions. Getting there early means seeing the possible future in time to reflect, consider alternatives, establish a position, and choose the best course of action. The Institute for the Future's Foresight to Insight to Action Cycle is one way to get there early. The Institute is a nonprofit research group of which Johansen is a former president.
The goal of foresight is less to predict the future than to understand what is happening now, to see the direction of change, and to provoke thought. Directions of change can be seen more clearly by looking several years into the future. Foresight can be embodied in a forecast, which Johansen defines as "a plausible, internally consistent view of what might happen." (p. 16) In contrast, a definite prediction that something will happen is almost always wrong. A forecast is useful if it provokes thought, even if it turns out to be wrong. Forecasts can be based on aggregations of expert opinions, historical analogies, or analyses of alternate scenarios, among other things.
As an example, Johansen summarized the Institute for the Future's most recent 10-year forecast, which focuses on identifying directions of change rather than possible end states. Among the story lines that the Institute foresees driving change are personal empowerment of individuals both as consumers and as workers, grassroots economics that will favor networked organizations over traditional hierarchies, and smart use of networking by individuals.
The future will be characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity ("the VUCA world"). (Preface) To cope with the VUCA world, leaders of organizations will need the following:
- Vision to provide a clear goal to guide actions and actively shape the future.
- Understanding developed through sensing and listening with an open mind without judging too soon.
- Clarity in explaining goals and methods of achieving them to others.
- Agility to cope with the inevitable surprises and attacks, and to let the real world shape action.
In the VUCA world, leaders will be constantly challenged with dilemmas. Most leaders were trained to solve problems and move on. For Johansen, problems have a clear solution with a winner and a loser. Dilemmas are recurrent, complex, messy, threatening, enigmatic, and confusing. They cannot be solved; they must be lived with. But, if leaders can engage with and learn from dilemmas, they may be able to devise win-win strategies.
Getting from foresight to insight is, Johansen frankly admits, not straightforward; it requires intuition, "the ability to understand and make sense out of what you are gathering." (p. 224) Leaders and future leaders can develop intuition through training and practice. The best forms of training are immersion experiences that model a possible future world, including
- simulations of reality
- alternate reality games (virtual and real)
- role-playing and scenarios
- mentoring or shadowing (immersion in another person's daily life)
Less involving experiences include
- watching theatrical improvisations
- reading case studies
Immersion experiences are essential because there is little fixed content to pass on in the VUCA world. Instead, aspiring leaders should practice dealing with unexpected situations. Through these methods, they can "imagine provocative futures that might never have occurred to them before" (p. 121), grasp the inner nature of things (one definition of insight), and practice new ways of acting in a low-risk environment.
Moving from insight to action means developing a strategy: a goal and an idea of how to accomplish it. However, the means must remain flexible within that strategic intent. Even when the intent is clear, the means to achieve it often are not. "Great leaders will want to consider multiple paths and multiple options." (p. 224) Action must unfold and evolve with the situation. Johansen gives some examples of the Foresight to Insight to Action Cycle that read somewhat like syllogisms in formal logic.
Foresight: Much of the world will have limited access to knowledge.
Insight: The world needs a free, open-source encyclopedia.
Action: Create Wikipedia. (p. 152)
Foresight: People who are poor need connectivity.
Insight: An expensive service can be reimagined to be affordable in poor regions.
Action: Create an affordable cell phone for text and voice. (p. 154)
The best organizations to carry out these actions will be "flexibly firm" networks and corporations with flattened, rather than traditional, hierarchies. Networks have many nodes rather than one strong center, which give them the flexibility to respond to the surprises of the VUCA world, but they are guided by a few strong rules or firmly held principles. Individual members have great flexibility within these principles to achieve the organization's strategic intent. Robust communications infrastructures are necessary to share feedback on what is working or not, share institutional memories and lessons learned, and build a sense of shared identity.
The Foresight to Insight to Action Cycle is a continuous cycle in which lessons learned from actions (hindsight) complete the cycle and lead to new foresight and insight to meet new challenges. Perhaps the most organized kind of hindsight is exemplified by the after-action reviews practiced in the military. These must be conducted immediately after the action; focus on performance, not on fault finding; influence or lead to follow-on training; and maintain morale. The results of each review should be recorded and preserved. Other, less formal sources of hindsight include learning from experiences in the field or learning from how adversaries handled similar challenges.
In this book, Johansen presents many striking ideas, but, at least for me, it seems unclear how to carry them out in practice. Perhaps that is his point, however: it is difficult to be a leader in the VUCA world and not at all clear what to do.
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