Killing The Official Future

Abstract

We all know the future is important to our professions, our organizations, and our personal lives. Many of us are fascinated by emerging social trends, technology and research breakthroughs, or industry news. But as compelling as these glimpses into the potential future may be, it can be a daunting task to connect them back to our dayto-day business lives. Futures Praxis aims to help bridge the gulf between today and the opportunities of tomorrow by examining useful theories emerging in foresight research and providing ways to apply them to meet personal or organizational goals.The key to foresight is that it is not an event, but an ongoing process of strategic conversation. Future columns will discuss how to develop plausible alternative futures, how to sense the direction the real future is moving, and how companies have turned challenges into opportunities.The first occurrence of this column coincides with a special issue on transforming corporate culture. A company's "official future" is a key element of its culture, emerging from shared assumptions people in the organization hold about the future and their understanding of how that organization has managed against those assumptions in the past. An assessment of your organization's official future, and a program to identify and fill in its gaps, is the first step in applying foresight to your innovation portfolio and strategy development. Acknowledging the official future, and its role in an organization's culture, can be a critical step in driving culture change to pull an organization into the future.Despite our perceived inability to use the future to guide choices, in reality we do it hundreds of times a day. We all have a mental model of the future, built up over time based on experience and socialized points of view, that we reference subconsciously. This mental model helps us quickly assess risks and consequences and take action-when, for instance, weather seems likely to threaten an important delivery to a customer, a data problem is pushing back the research timeline, or a competitor is cutting prices or romancing an important distributor. For all of those cases, our mental model of the future means that identifying the best course to move ahead is almost a reflex, an instinctual and well-known set of actions like the muscle memory of a world-class tennis player.That mental model is incredibly good at helping us make quick decisions for short-term activities, but it remains relatively static. That means it may fail to assimilate dramatic shifts in the forces shaping the future, either quickly or over time. The results can be disastrous. In his remarkable book Deep Survival (2004), Laurence Gonzales studies a number of human disasters, from shipwrecks to mountain climbing accidents, alongside cutting-edge fMRI studies of what happens in the brain during stressful conditions. His conclusion is simple: those who perish continue to make decisions using the same frameworks as before. Survivors recognize that conditions have changed and immediately discard the assumptions and goals they had relied on. They abandon their official future.It turns out it is the same for organizations. In 1983, Royal Dutch Shell undertook a study to discover what makes some companies last while others fail. As Arie de Geus recounts in The Living Company (1997), of the four common conditions researchers identified in long-lasting companies, the first was "anticipating the need for change at least once during their lives. . . . Frequently, someone within the enterprise would identify the crisis ahead of time, but not as a crisis; it was a new opportunity, an alternative avenue for company growth." (p. 23). Somehow, some companies can sense deep change in their business environment, recognize the need to alter their approach to accommodate (or exploit) it, and execute that change in a way that doesn't just avoid risk, but increases success.So why is it that some people or companies can do this and others cannot? …