Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Putting the Future on the Table

I am aware that large organizations are not strangers to strategic planning or crisis management. They have the requisite speakers and programs and exercises. Much of it is quite impressive.


There's one thing, however, they often do not have: People with the sole responsibility of identifying problems that aren't on the current radar screen but which will be appearing in five to ten years or more.


Now you may quickly note, "Isn't that task carried by the other functions?" And you'd be correct but those functions hold other responsibilities as well and those other jobs can either defuse and distract or can produce the leaden hand of practicality that crushes the ability to sense faint signals.


The environmental movement was bubbling in the Fifties but few people noticed it. The civil rights movement was boiling over at the same time and even then many underestimated its impact. The auto execs in Detroit scoffed at competition from Japan until it was at their throats. Currently in Europe ,you can see a nervous realization of the potential impact of radical - as opposed to moderate - Islamic immigrants and yet that problem has been growing for years.


Just one task: Spot the future issues. Identify the eventual developments. Tell us what might happen if China turns into a fascist megapower, oil is no longer needed to power vehicles, marriage is replaced by polygamy as an institution, the Latin American nations aren't able to produce sufficient jobs, movies go directly from producers to consumers via the Internet, there's permanent drought in the Southwest, or any number of changes occur that might have enormous impact.


I recall conducting some workforce projection workshops for an energy company back in the Eighties. In the course of my research, I ran across the far-sighted view of a diplomat from Singapore. He said that the invasions of the future would be conducted by immigrants, not armies. When I talked about immigration to the classes in those days, the issue was sort of a parlor topic reserved for professors, consultants, and demographers. People were interested, but they didn't personally witness the connection to their jobs and communities.


Now immigration is a topic that people discuss around their kitchen tables.


Large organizations would be wise to bring together a small and diverse group of thinkers and give them one job: Find the kitchen table issues of the future.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't say that planning for the unexpected is something that corporations do very well at all. I don't believe that that is their real function, so I don't believe this is necessarily a bad thing.

Corporations are without peer in history at marshalling limited resources in the most effective way to accomplish stated goals. I think this statement is beyond dispute. Part of this is limited postulation about what would happen if. However, the future is so changeable, it just isn't an effective use of corporate resources to engage in wild speculation about what may happen.

The philosophers are the ones who are best able to predict the future, although they generally have a terrible track record on that. For every far seeing one accurately foreseeing the rise of immigration as an important issue, there are many predicting the world will have run out of food by 1996. No one knows which predictions are accurate and which fancy. A corporation guided by such speculation is as likely to store up tons and tons of grain as to put itself in position to be proactive in regards to immigrants. There is an old saying that nothing changes quite so quickly as present predictions of the future.

In some ways, it is true corporations on top of the world right now accurately predicted the future yesterday. But such is almost a function of luck as much as hard work. Yes, I said luck. You cannot tell me that the people at Google work harder and are so much smarter than the people who founded NetScape. And yet, one is Google and the other is NetScape. One’s prediction proved accurate and the other, not so much.

As a whole, the market is very prescient when it comes to the future. Individual corporations are not. Corporations should not overly waste resources on such speculations, but rather do what they do well.

Michael Wade said...

Pawnking,

I wouldn't advocate devoting a huge amount of resources to this because doing so would simply create another bureaucracy and would probably squelch creativity. Certainly, the futurists are often hilariously off-target. The process of thinking ahead in off-beat ways, however, can produce big pay-offs. The energy company project resulted in the organization being better able to attract, manage, and retain more workers than its competition because it understood how the workforce was changing. Policies that had made sense with one group were becoming outdated. The Detroit executives who dismissed the appeal of foreign cars as simply a sign of crazy Californian buying habits were operating from inside a cocoon.

By and large I agree with Milton Friedman's view that businesses should just focus on business. A small team of crazy thinkers, however, could surface some extremely helpful ideas.

wolli said...

One of the reasons why so few corporations use smart people to think about possible futures is that [at least the public] corporations are obsessed with the current quarter's bottom line.

Long-range thinking doesn't usually produce immediately useful results that could be bragged about as being "great success". Worse yet, this kind of thinkers tend to use quite a lot of "dark paint" in their future scenarios, but most managers are much happier paying for "good" predictions.

Michael Wade said...

Wolli,

It can be real challenge to think beyond immediate needs. American political campaigns often hit a wall after the primary because the political operatives were discouraging any post-primary thinking, saying, "Let's win the primary first." That is wise up to a point and then it produces problems.