Futures are intangible, and are therefore so easily dismissed
The author is a fellow futures / strategic foresight practitioner who is extremely experienced. The thrust of his post was that;
"The futures are not tangible, and thus easily dismissed by most stakeholders. They couldn't care less about it".
He then spoke about how he he has carried out work "for many different clients of all sizes, but that it doesn't really matter what their structure was, they never cared much about the future", and that it was because "the future is not tangible, not as a singular nor a plural abstraction and so stakeholders and decision makers do always tend to oversee it and dismiss it."
He asked for other people's thoughts and so I supplied some of mine (restricted by the number of characters you can use in a LinkedIn reply).
In my experience, it can be very difficult to work with some commercial enterprises in the area of futures thinking (especially with publicly listed companies) because many are driven by short-termism, due to the demands of shareholders and their insatiable need for growth and bigger dividends.
My more complete lists of thoughts are below:
It is usually easier to talk to naturally suspicious organisations about 'strategic foresight' than use the 'futures thinking' label.
It is usually easier to talk to naturally suspicious organisations about 'strategic foresight' than use the 'futures thinking' label.
We need to recognise that while people say they want change, they rarely want to change.
If we accept this to be true, then rather than make a big deal about the differences between strategic foresight and the current view of business strategy, we have more to gain by showing them some parallels to more usual business tools they should be reasonably familiar with. This will help demonstrate a common ground that provides some familiarity and comfort. On that basis, I remind them that:
- If they use business strategies and business plans, they are already working with forecasts of an assumed future, albeit with shorter time frames.
- If they have ever done any scenario planning, they have already been looking at potential futures.
- If they are familiar with, or use McKinsey’s three-horizons model to categorise their goals into different time ‘horizons’, well, we use a similar, but different version, (Bill Sharpe’s model).
- If they have a company vision, this was an earlier attempt to capture a view of their preferred future.
For those who remain tethered to their past and believe that the future will be ‘as is now, plus or minus x% as an ongoing trend’, I help 'unblock' them by doing a ‘look back to look forward’ exercise, where I ask them to look back from today and write down on an axis that goes from Past to the Present, the changes they have seen in their industry over the previous 30 - 50 years. To assist them with this, I suggest they use STEEP themes (Societal; Tech; Economic; Environmental; Political) to remind them of those key changes. Once this exercise has finished, I can normally point out that if their industry has seen all of those changes in the previous time period, why would they believe that even the next 10 years will be just be as is, plus or minus x%?
This helps cut the cord to the past and set things up for a more engaged stakeholder group.
This helps cut the cord to the past and set things up for a more engaged stakeholder group.
Of course, any workshop of this nature requires a commitment to follow-through and action from the participants, so I usually spend time with them to develop an action plan cw dates and owners - a plan that can be shared, and they are held accountable to - not only through the natural chain of command, but through peer pressure.
The original thread post and thread had some great discussion and debate and is here:
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