Where do you do futures work in organisations?

I was pondering a comment made recently about a paper I had written about the focus of my work in organisations. The comment was:

Contains practical examples? Good here, but they are only departmental planning, not divisional, business unit, or corporate. In other words, entry level practice with middle managers.

My reading of this comment is that futures work is best done at divisional, business unit or corporate levels, and not with middle managers. That is, don't work with the staff, work only with the senior and executive managers of an organisations.  Don't focus on 'entry level practice' (whatever that is!), only focus on advanced practice.  

There are two assumptions at work here:

• that only senior managers can think strategically, and staff just need to do what they are told, and
  
• that senior managers know how to think long term by virtue of their position in organisations,
  

and they are two assumptions to be challenged quickly!

My view is that all staff can think strategically if given the opportunity, but senior managers and leaders often underestimate the abilities of their staff in this area, and don't provide the opportunities when they are developing strategy. My experience with working with staff in departments is that their ideas and views about the future are usually very long-sighted and provide a different perspective for leaders to integrate into their thinking.

Of course, many leaders aren't ready to integrate anyone's thinking into their own, yet having an open mind and a willingness to seek diversity of perspectives are two leadership literacies for the knowledge era (thanks to Heather Davis of Waypoint Consulting for this term). If a leader thinks that her or his thinking is just fine, thank you, why would they insist that staff have authentic opportunities to contribute to the strategy development process? These types of leaders - those who don't seek out others perspectives in the strategy process - are demonstrating the command and control approach to leadership that will do them and their organisations no favours into the future.

I'll keep doing my 'entry level practice' with people in departments to strengthen their strategic thinking, because this is where we will start to build a critical mass of people who understand why strategic thinking - strategic foresight, thinking long term - will be critical to our futures.  These are the people who may well be leaders of our educational institutions in the future, and they  will then bring to those senior roles the ability to think strategically.

Everyone has the ability to think strategically about the future, and we need to spend some time and money developing this ability as a core capability for our workforce today.

Dump the Drone: Livelier Elearning

I found this presentation when I was checking out SlideShare recently, and thought I would share it with you. While it's provided by a consultant in the education industry, it provides some  'how-to' ideas that apply not only to elearning, but more generally to presentations and writing. It also highlights the continuing challenge we all face in conveying ideas and concepts in a way that engages our brains, and doesn't send us to sleep!

Dump the Drone: Livelier Elearning

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: design instructional)

Watching the Outliers

I watched another report this morning on Peter Andrews and natural sequence farming. This is probably the third media report I've seen,which meets the 'three times on my radar screen' requirement, so I checked out his website. What made me go there was the comment that he is seen as an outlier, as someone whose approach is contradictory to what science has told us about farming for a long, long time. He is having some success, yet has much opposition. His 'promise' that "Australia could be carbon negative in a year!" is a brave one, but if it's true...

Peter Andrews is probably still an outlier, even though he uses YouTube as part of his efforts to communicate the value of his approach and is in the mainstream media, with a really busy schedule. His ideas haven't yet been accepted by governments, but they warrant watching.

It's an example of the need to track emerging issues from the periphery, not when they have reached government acceptance stage. Dismissing the work of outliers because they do not fit expected patterns or conform to conventional wisdom is our usual response to what often sounds just a little to weird to be true. Yet, this is how we miss what might be coming, and end up reacting to the future after it hits us in the face!

Think about sustainability - the term is now so mainstream, it is a part of our language and part of how we live (think of all the 'how to be green' tips we get everywhere we go). Yet, 15-20 years ago, the evidence and warnings being put forward by scientists and activists was dismissed as rubbish. It didn't fit conventional wisdom then, but it does now. What changed our minds was when the very obvious destruction of the world's natural environment hit us in the face and we couldn't ignore it anymore. But, where would we be now if we weren't so dismissive of the sustainability outliers in the past?

The work of outliers might indeed be weird and not helpful, but you won't know this unless you track them. If, in fact, their work is very relevant to our futures, then there is nothing to lose by adding 'outlier tracking' to your environmental scanning work. It's what is often called looking for early warning signals.

I always say in my workshops that if you have a 'that's rubbish' or 'that will never happen' reaction to something, then you must track it, if only to test the validity of your assumptions about what you believe to be real. Open your mind, dismiss nothing and explore what might just be possible in the future.

Futures in Education

I signed up recently to be a member of the Foresight Education wiki which has as its vision "To teach as much about the future as we teach about the past." It's early days for the wiki which was set up by a group of futures educators who are working to increase teaching about the future in education across the board.

Their vision highlights the biggest challenge to those of us who work in the futures field - convincing people that relying only on the past and present to inform decisions in an environment of rapid, complex and discontinuous change no longer works. Because the future might evolve over a range of possible pathways, you need to think strategically about what might happen in those plausible and alternative futures before you decide on what you will do today.

You can't predict the future, but you sure can think clearly about what might happen, and it's that sort of 'strategic thinking' skill that we need to be promoting and working to develop - not only in education, but in business and in our personal lives. It's about thinking differently and questioning some of the 'business-as-usual" assumptions that underpin our decision making processes.

As an example, some students of the University of Houston futures studies program have set up a wiki around "The Futures of the US". Designed as a resource for teachers in the context of the current US presidential elections, it's an example of how informed and systematic thinking about a range of issues can help to generate questions we might not have thought about if we do not consider the future implications of decisions we are making today.

You might say that you think about the future every day, but it's usually an unconscious skill that most of us don't recognise we have. Teaching foresight in schools and universities will help people recognise their inate foreisght capability, and how to use that skill to make more informed decisions today that contribute to a sustainable future for us all.

So, head over to the wiki to have a look, and let's you and I take up the challenge posed by the Foresight Education group:

Nurture the Future!

Become an Advocate of Foresight Education