A lot of my work revolves around leading teams to brighter futures – and a lot of that work is about anticipating the future, deciding on a future, then bringing it to life.
The future belongs to those who can communicate about it.
Good leaders don't wait to discover the future, they create it.
Designing and anticipating the future is the first fundamental step of the Releasing Business Agility model I use; paint a bright picture of the future and align people around it.
It’s harder than I make it sound there, but we all want to know our work is leading to something bigger and better. We want to know what our True North is when things get tough. We want to understand the vision and mission of the businesses we work within. Understanding the business strategy is essential.
The painted picture is the emotional aspect of our future - it's essentially a story about the future that we're trying to bring to life. It’s something we can connect with.
It’s an articulation of the problems we face as a business painted with a positive, futuristic lens. It’s a way of explaining what we’re doing in business so like minded and talented people feel a connection to the work.
Listing goals, metrics and measures doesn’t connect with people like a story does. Stories go where facts cannot (one of the 10 principles covered in the communication workshop) – and the painted picture is a way to tell that story.
We may never achieve this future but at least we have a direction, a path, a waypoint, a star to head towards. And this is why the future belongs to those who can communicate about it.
Seneca once said:
You must know for which harbor you are headed if you are to catch the right wind to take you there.
Another common way of saying this is “that no wind is favourable if you don’t know where you are going”.
The future ambitions of the business, communicated well, is the destination we can connect to; the wind that will guide our sales; the harbour we are heading towards.
How to anticipate the future(s)
I’m going to share with you a really good model for looking at futures using Jim Dator's archetypes and the future(s) cone.
But Rob, why do you keep putting"future(s)" with an s? Simple really - there is no single future but potential futures. We'll come on to that.
The first step when designing a story about the future(s) or a painted picture, is to slow down, pause and ponder some potential futures.
To do this we'll use Jim Dator's four archetypes. These are extremely helpful to think about in the context of your team, business, or even your life.
Continuity and growth
With this archetype the business continues as it is and gets better over time. Things keep incrementally getting a little bit better. No major changes needed, just some optimisation and improvements.
Think about the business now and consider what the future will be like, if it keeps getting a little bit better and growing.
It may take a while to get better but our hope here is that things will continue to grow and keep improving.
This is the path many business leaders and managers adopt. Continue as is, but just be a bit better.
However, if this is a future you land on remember that things won't just get better by themselves - you'll need to find levers to pull, problems to solve and opportunities for improvement.
Collapse
Now we think about a more negative future. Things get worse until they collapse.
Without major changes things just keep getting worse. Or things get so bad that eventually the business collapses. Many businesses go down this route – and I’d like to think that they didn’t plan to.
With no major interventions, or changes, things just keep heading south. The leaders and managers continue to do as they have done (or maybe do some epic failed interventions) – and things get worse.
Many businesses are on this path now. The news is littered with businesses that have reached the end of the path.
Discipline
In the disciplined future the business deals with the bad, and it rewards the good.
Managers, leaders and employees fix the broken things and reward good work. More good work should get done, and the negative, bad, problematic stuff gets dealt with. But this requires discipline. Discipline in the now, and in the future.
You’ve heard me say over and over again that there are always more problems that we can ever solve, so we must fully comprehend the bright future and the strategy, so we deal with the right problems.
This requires discipline, hard conversations, prioritisation, data informed decision making and performance management.
Many leaders and managers want this, then lack the ability to bring about this discipline. They want better performance, better control of costs, better employee behaviours but often fail to hold the bar high and garner this discipline.
The idea here is to think about what your business would be like if you mustered that discipline.
- What would it be like if people stopped passing the burden and started fixing problems?
- What would it be like if low performance was dealt with?
- What would it be like if decisions were made using evidence rather than opinions?
- What would it be like if you accelerated the good, and dealt with the bad?
And this is not just about the now, but also about ensuring that discipline remains in the future, as it becomes the norm of that business.
This is a bright future, but it often requires behavioural change.
As a side note – this is my defacto approach to consulting and leading teams – highly disciplined fun teams where the good is accelerated and bad is dealt with.
Transformation
“Transformation” is about considering a very different company future. You are transforming, not incrementally getting better, nor applying discipline to fix things, but changing the paradigms of the company.
Many leaders start “transformation” programs but the reality is, these are nothing more than large scale attempts to do the “discipline” or “continuity and growth” archetypes codified into a plan.
In other words, they talk about transformation but aim too low, don’t change anything and don’t muster any discipline either.
“We are going to transform by broadly doing what we’ve always done and fixing a few issues.” No wonder many transformation programs fail.
Transformation is more than simply fixing a few things, or hoping the future will be different, or applying a bit of discipline.
In this context, transformation is about looking at the paradigms of the business and shifting them entirely. It’s not about being agile or lean, but potentially about being a fundamentally different business.
This one is hard.
Most people cannot escape their own thinking to enable them to even think this big. And to truly transform an organisation, you’re going to need some outstanding communication, motivated leaders and a strong focus on bringing the future to life.
- How can you describe something that most people cannot see in their own mind?
- How can you guide people to transform when most people are happy to continue as is?
Transformational future thinking that creates a true transformation is wild, big, audacious – crazy maybe? And I love it.
It's not common though but there are often stories of companies who bring in a new leader and utterly transform the business.
The future(s) cone
Using the archetypes it's possible to ponder, ideate and think through potential futures for the business.
They are designed to get you to consider what that future might look like, including the pros and cons, challenges, realities and the potential path you may need to walk. And it requires big thinkers and big thinking.
I've written about dreamers and managers before, and how it’s the manager’s job to protect the dreamers. Well, this kind of future thinking activity requires dreaming at all levels of the organisation.
We’re often too busy grinding, hustling, meeting deadlines and hitting targets to dream about potential futures.
That’s why designing futures starts with pausing, slowing down and thinking about the archetypes.
Here is a futures cone model that I often use with leaders and managers to get them to visually see their options for the future.
You can overlay the archetypes and do a cone for each one, or maybe you wish to show each of them on the one cone. There's no right or wrong way - it's time to get creative and consider the four potential future scenarios in the cone (covered below the image).
This cone works on the premise that you have a reasonable understanding of your current reality - this is not always the case. Many leaders and managers lie to themselves, ignore solid facts and often don't lean into the current reality for many reasons, the main one being they created this reality in the first place.
But, assuming you have some idea of the current reality, you can start to think about futures, and map them onto the diagram.
- What is a possible future?
- Dream big, transcend current knowledge, aim for the stars
- Don't be constrained with your thinking with this level.
- You could use the "Transformational" archetype here - it's a good fit.
- What is a plausible future?
- Given our current understanding what could plausibly happen?
- You could use the "Continuity and Growth" or "Collapse" archetypes here - are either of them plausible?
- If you have market data, does that give you clues on how the market is moving?
- What is a probable future?
- This is kind of a linear extension of the current
- What if you used the "discipline" archetype here?
- What, if you did little at all, would probably happen?
- What is the preferred future?
- What does each individual subjectively want to happen?
- How would everyone want the future to unfold?
Pay close attention to the answers to number 4; the preferred future. This future gives you clues as to the preferences of the people you are working with. Number 4 is all about what they want to happen. And this may not be what the business needs to happen.
Any good leader or manager will pay attention to what people prefer the future to be like. It will give you strong clues on how to engage them if the future plan is different to what they want, or how to train them, persuade them, educate or cajole if change is what is needed.
Do they want the future to stay the same, become easier, be less stressful, be easier or more tailored to their own needs? Or do they want something audacious and ambitious? Or something in between? Or people focused, or astronomically successful?
I’ve seen many leaders come up with amazing plans only to see them derailed by someone influential who had a different “preferred future”.
A futures cone session works best as an immersive workshop where people can add stickers, post it notes or doodles to a collective visual. Then chat through the pros and cons and ultimately come away with a plan for the future.
You could say that imagining future(s) is the easy part. Because after this you have to communicate, communicate, communicate to bring it to life.
Whether the future is scary and ambitious, or disciplined, or an improved continuity of today doesn't matter - what matters is you've thought it through, decided on it and are moving smoothly and quickly towards it. Let's hope the group haven't collectively decided the future is collapse.
And that's how you start your journey of releasing business agility - by imagining a bright future and morphing the whole organisation behind bringing it to life.
The future belongs to those who can communicate about it. Good leaders don't wait to discover the future, they create it.
