Foresight Culture

In our often frenzied, multi-tasking lives, it’s hard to get quality thinking done. I recommend using writing as a way to learn, to think, and to figure things out. The act of writing (more than a couple of paragraphs) requires you to think something through, frame your thoughts in new ways, and figure out relationships among ideas. You may discover in writing that you learned something new, something that might never have come fully formed to mind. 

Nurturing the habit of writing to explore and understand means doing more writing. And, since exploring the future is open-ended, everything is important and relevant to the future–you need to capture your thinking, nearly anytime, anyplace. Having a commonplace book or journal–whether it’s handwritten or electronic–is a great way to seize the moment and get something written down. You can always return later to see if what you wrote is worth developing further. but get it written down or you may lose the thought altogether.

I am a strong believer in the power and value of understanding personality and cognitive styles as a part of effective work in exploring the future. That’s true even if you are working alone–you need to know your own mind in doing futures work. Are you a black and white thinker, or do you see lots of grey areas? Do you like to use logic or focus on how you feel emotionally about things? Knowing about your cognitive styles and others’ is extremely valuable if you are part of a team that needs to confront change and build strategies for dealing with it. If you’ve found doing that work hard, maybe you don’t know enough about the personalities and cognitive styles on your team.

Most organizational executives have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and at one time knew their Myers-Briggs Type. Mine is I/ENTP, the I/E indicates that I rated about evenly between extroversion and introversion. The N means intuiting, the T, thinking, and the P, perceiving. I first took the test about 20 years ago. It helped me clarify things about my work style and my personal interactions with others.

If you never have known, or have long since forgotten your Myers-Briggs Type, you should go back and take the test. There are several versions free, online. One can be found here, and another here. The online tests are not perfect–they tend to try to find a type with fewer questions than the longer printed versions, but give one a try.

A less-well-known, but particularly useful indiactor is the Kirton Adaptation Innovation Inventory [Link]. It is based on a theory of cognitive style that says everyone is creative, but that there are distinctly different styles of creativity that fall on a continuum from adaptive creative–people who create "inside the box" and innovative creative–those who see no boundaries on their creative ideas. Knowing your place and your colleagues’ place on the continuum can help you understand how you and they will explore choices and potential innovations together.

Unfortunately, the Kirton Centre, which controls the KAI, does not make a do-it-yourself test available, and they believe firmly that you should be tested under the guidance of a certified KAI consultant. No KAI type is inherently good or bad, but as with the Myers Briggs, knowing more about yourself is inherently good–it can make it possible to be more effective and less uncertain in work, dealing with others. 

In my work as a futurist and in collaborating with others in foresight, it has been valuable to know my personality type and cognitive style, and those of my colleagues. It has been clear over the years that some people are not comfortable with conjecture–a critical part of futures work, and some are not instinctive about looking at grey areas, which is also critical in exploring future possibilities. It’s possible to clarify those things in exploring personality and cognitive styles. In almost any setting, having multiple cognitive or personality styles on the team is a good thing. But not understanding the different styles is not a good thing, and can destroy any benefit you might get from variety.

If you are pretty well convinced that one or another colleague is crazy, or that they are of limited mental ability, you may be reacting to their personality type or cognitive style. Surely they are not crazy or stupid, just different. And maybe they’ve got the missing piece you need, if only you could see it and know how to fit it with what you can do.

Foresight is difficult enough without adding layers of misunderstanding and opposition to the effort. Try to understand who you are and who your colleagues are, how they think and react. Your chances of success are much greater if you do. Don’t beat your head against a brick wall.

Does a persona of “different” help you drive more foresight in an organization? It can. Chances are, if you’ve been pressing your colleagues to open their minds to new ideas, if you’ve been rethinking things, reframing how you talk about them, reconsidering the conventional wisdom, you’ve already gotten personally branded for your “otherness”. If that’s so, go with it. Make the most of it. Be different.

“But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”  –Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957

“A trader who was subject to the traditional social obligations and constraints would find it very difficult to run a viable business. If, for example, he were fully part of the village society and subject to the constraints of the society, he would be expected to be generous in the traditional way to those in need. It would be difficult for him to refuse credit, and it would not be possible to collect debts … The inherent conflict of interest in a face-to-face market transaction would make proper etiquette impossible or would at least strain it severely, which is an important factor in Thai social relations.”

Image: pasotraspaso, via Flickr, cc: attribution license. 

At the center of exploring the future is a permanent need, one that transcends everything else. That is the need to think new thoughts. The one certainty about the future is that things will be different. Because of that, we need to be sure we try out new thinking, even though we are unsure about what could happen. It is better to be wrong than to be silent.

I am writing this on Election Day 2008 in the United States. For me, Election Day has stirred up a lot of thinking about change. The sense of my professional futurist community is that this election offers the opportunity for sweeping change for US society, with global implications. For some it is a make-or-break moment. Why is it so important?

Image: Tacit Requiem, via Flickr, cc license 

1. Local, regional, national, global and organizational recovery depends on actions we take now. We cannot wait to begin new strategic initiatives and we cannot descend into the purely tactical and expect to succeed in the long term.
2. Everything is changing, and many things are called into question. This is a critical moment to move our focus past narrow interests and look at the bigger systems that we are part of. [See: Our big test]
3. Most of what we do has to be re-thought as our core assumptions about the marketplace get reexamined. The organizations that get that thinking going now can be ahead of their competitors in tackling new opportunities that will emerge when the economy stabilizes, and, hopefully, begins to grow again.
4. Foresight now can help us have positive thoughts by moving our thinking beyond the immediate crisis to build an opportunity focus, not just a problem focus. We can work to get un-stuck, focus on what we can control, and begin to move forward. [See: Foresight helps you get un-stuck]
5. Because so many systems are disrupted, we may be free from the usual constraints on our thoughts and ideas to think wholly fresh thoughts about our markets, sector, products, and so on [See: Does the economic crisis create an opening?]
6. A fresh look at the market, and the skills, technologies, contacts, products, and so on that we have to leverage could yield ideas with low- or zero-budget impact that we can do now.
7. Now may be the time to “rebuild it better”. In other words, some of the systems, processes, and businesses we have had may best be not shored up and revived as they were, but might better be rethought completely.
8. Get an edge on the competition. Others may be in a weakened condition and will not be focused on opportunities. The ability to envision a positive path forward and begin to take action toward it now will mean near and longer-term success in the marketplace.
9. Despite tough times, if we have a positive outlook, a vision, and plans for action, we are likely to give others confidence in us. For example, in tight credit market, lenders will favor those with a positive spirit and a clear path forward. We can show our customers, vendors, business partners, lenders, investors, shareholders, and so on, a positive outlook and strategic view forward.

ForesightCulture.com is now one year old. I launched this blog as a place to share insights on using foresight successfully. I write it for people in organizations, not for the community of professional futurists, but gratifyingly, my futurist colleagues have read and commented (positively) on my work here too.

Aside from the “who I am” and “contact” pages here, the top posts/pages of interest to readers over the year of the blog’s life are as follows:

1. 27 habits of highly successful futurists (a special page of “best practices” for people trying to get futures thinking through to their organizations)
2. Scanning the landscape for challenges, issues, and opportunities
3. Quotes (a special page of quotes that inspire me, and that relate to foresight)
4. Ask the right questions
5. Talk to the frog
6. Environmental scanning, Flickr, YouTube, and photoblogs
7. The power of the paleo future
8. Oh my god, Fred is soooo annoying!
9. Why I love introducing scenario thinking  to people           
10. Considering different environmental scanning approaches
11. Environmental scanning  (a special page on environmental scanning in the Internet age)
12. Looking at the world through a different lens
13. Reframers (a special page on some of the thinkers who successfully reorient our thinking on the world and the systems we are part of)
14. All futures are global
15. Is environmental scanning just one more chore?  

How-to thoughts have proven popular (and I hope useful) to my readers, and environmental scanning is at the center of that. Some of the thinking grew from post ideas to special blog features, and those pages: "Envrionmental scanning," "Quotes," "Reframers," and the "27 habits of highly successful futurists" have been especially popular.

Thanks to everyone who has read my work here a little or a lot, who has tried to get some value from it, and who has shared their own insights with me. It has been, and will be my privilege and joy to keep ForesightCulture going a while longer. Let me know, please, if there are things you think I ought to write about.

My 10-year-old is learning about the US Government and Constitution. Last night, I helped him review the three branches of government, the roles of each, and so on. For a young boy, it’s about a system that leads and protects us. As far as he knows, the right people are there, doing the right things. I spared him my cynicism about Government. Why cause nightmares!

But do we really have the leadership we need? We are facing a big test, right now. We are in danger of coming up short, focusing too narrowly, and solving only the superficial problems, rather than addressing big needs and the rot in the system.

Someone wrote last week that the US Congress’ bailout plan was “government by Dow”. That too is a danger. It’s easy to share and easy to grasp the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a measure of what’s happening in the economy, but it isn’t a good measure. It often reflects panic: a stampede in or out of securities. We won’t do the right things if we look at the wrong indicators.

Also, by bad coincidence, we in the US are going through an election cycle right now. Old conventional wisdom is still holding sway, and our congresspeople are not inclined to step up and be statesmen. They are afraid of a misstep. And, because of what they think is an essential schedule to keep, they literally don’t have time to save the world right now, they’re trying to get re-elected. So they’ve gone home to campaign, instead of being on hand to address the needs of the national and global economic systems.

So we are facing a big test nationally and globally, and our proclivities are not in our favor in passing that test. Our thinking is in danger of being near-term and narrow, not broad and future-oriented.

At least in our personal and professional lives we can have better control over the debate, the strategy making, and the actions we will take. We can’t let ourselves fall in the same trap as our leaders. We need to give some of our mental energy to new ideas, even as we fret about the broken system. Let’s look beyond what’s broken or failing at what can be done in new ways, what can be started now, what we can do, not what we can’t. We can pass the test we face if we advance toward, rather than retreat from the challenges. That starts with our own visions and plans, and we can hope our political leaders wake up to it too. We need foresight now more than ever.

Image: rpongsaj via Flickr

The economic crisis is disrupting the big systems we depend on, and we have a long way to go before most of us can be reassured about how things will turn out. The market crisis is rooted in badly warped and out-of-control financial systems, but we are also at a moment of potential transformational change in our recognition of high energy costs, and the importance of addressing environmental issues. For Americans, a series of natural disasters, including Hurricane Ike, only add to the sense we face enormous challenges.

These joined crises represent a re-setting of things on a global scale. What was normal three weeks ago, is changed. Conventional wisdom has been shown up and made wrong. Our assumptions about the world, the market, and so on, have to be re-thought. So let’s get some value out of that. What’s bad in our immediate view can be good for driving new futures thinking.

It is time to take up a serious, but positive question: “now what?” We should restart our thinking and look at:

• The fundamentals: is our business model or organizational mission sound? Should we change it? How?
• Our strengths and resiliency facing change: not what have we lost, but what have we got that is valuable and strong as we face the future? Put the focus on strengths and opportunities, not just on weaknesses and threats.
• What do we want? If things are going to change, how would we like the future to turn out? Let’s assume we can’t have precisely what we wanted to have a few weeks ago. But what can we have, and what do we want?
• What should we do differently? Since “everything” is changing, let’s be sure to not hang on to old ways and old systems by accident. Let’s revisit things we’ve been doing and change them if they need changing.

Being able to ask and consider these questions is an opportunity to make changes as we move into the next few years and decades. This is a way to take a longer-term view and a positive perspective on what’s happening, instead of a bunker mentality, and a false hope that everything will go back to normal.

As the economic crisis continues, we need to be sure all our energy doesn’t go to worrying, fretting, and taking stop-gap action. We must do what we must do, but it’s powerful and valuable to also give energy to the future. Now is the perfect moment to say “what’s next?” and to give answering that question our best thoughts and ideas.