Lead with Foresight
Posted on January 26, 2014 by George Casey, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
Rapidly changing technology, culture, and competition require leaders to develop and use foresight.
The Old Testament story of Joseph proves leaders’ interests in predicting the future are ancient. Joseph used the records of the Nile River’s flood trends and the intuitive dream of Pharaoh to predict Egypt would experience seven years of plenty and seven years of lean. It took information, imagination, and courage on Joseph’s part to deliver the news, and courage on Pharaoh’s part to hear the news. As a result, Egypt planned for the future by storing grain from the years of plenty for the years of lean.
Today, rapidly developing technologies, changing cultures, political uncertainties, environmental issues, climate concerns, and a global knowledge-service economy require leaders to develop and use foresight. During his 35+ years as an internationally renowned executive coach, psychoanalyst, and anthropologist Michael Maccoby found leaders who most effectively forecast the future do the following:
Scan the environment for trends, threats, opportunities, and projections; Seek out and listen to others with deep knowledge in these areas; Talk with and listen to key customers, suppliers, employees, and consultants; Study other organizations with long term success; Continuously develop knowledge about the organization, related businesses, and sectors; Identify the key drivers of change for their operation; Learn from unexpected strategic or operating results and consider their implications; Act on their intuition or gut about the future when the deep dives of research and quiet reasoning are inconclusive; Construct contingency plans for the possible future scenarios; and, Develop strategic plans for creating an realistic ideal future for their organizations.Andy Grove explained in Only The Paranoid Survive how his engineers knew Intel needed to move away from producing memory chips to developing processors long before he did, and they had already started thinking about the switch. The engineers knew from talking with colleagues working at other companies that Intel was at a disadvantage in memory production, a disadvantage that would only grow in the future.[i] Arie de Geus described how difficult it was for him to get leaders to consider possible alternative views of the future that were less convenient or inconsistent with the leaders’ worldviews[ii].
It takes courage to acknowledge inconvenient truths and to challenge the comfort of wishful group thinking. The leaders responsible for the operations and safety of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant knew Japan was prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. However, no one in a position that could make a difference was willing to lift up inconvenient truths. Forecasting is not just a data driven analytical matter for the head, it takes systems thinking and courage. Forecasting is a matter for the head, the imagination, and the heart.
De Geus, Arie, (2002), The Living Company, Harvard Business School Press, Boston
Grove, Andy, (1996), Only the Paranoid Survive, Random House, NY, NY
Maccoby, Michael, Predict the Future Better, Research Technology Management, Volume 52. No. 6. November-December, 2009. pp 64-65.
