Introducing Executives to Anticipatory
Leadership
How should executives and managers plan for the future? Of course, there are many, many creative responses to this question. Anticipatory Leadership integrates systems thinking and scenario planning in a way that interrogates the future, asking it to elaborate on the clues already in the present to reveal alternative futures that might emerge. What follows is our response to an RFP we received recently, which I think you might find of interest. Even though we didn't get the job, I still like what we came up with.
Two truths:- You win some and you lose some
- The journey is as important as the destination
Anticipatory Leadership:
Holistic Thinking and Global
Achievement
World class jugglers balance a
multiplicity of moving objects while maintaining a dynamic stillness. They remain alert, strong and centered
while things around them are in motion.
Designer, artist and photographer, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy used the term “suspended
equilibrium” to capture this capacity.[i]
Anticipatory
Leadership: Skillfully navigating an organization toward its future
Anticipatory Leadership is our term
for the type of executive ability in which futures thinking and strategic
action are manifested in positive, affirmative action. The program we propose here provides
participants with an introduction to this way of thinking.[ii]
We all have “memories
of the future," images of how our personal situations, our organizations
and the world as a whole are unfolding that guide our action in the present. In many instances, those views are
tacit, i.e., they shape thought, attitude, and behavior at a pre-conscious
level we don’t pay attention to.
Many of us would be hard pressed to describe our vision of the future in
detail, much less to provide the data behind it. When we do express these images, it is often in a context
where others already agree with us.
When there is a divergence of opinion, expressed views of the future
often lead to debate, disputation and polarization rather than strategic
inquiry and dialogue, especially when that conversation challenges sacred cows
and upends long held assumptions.
A leader who is able to engage groups in open, respectful dialogue
leading to a better understanding of possible alternative futures is rare.
It is our intention that this program
will add to the participants’ repertoire of leadership skills so
that they will be better able to convene, articulate and utilize the strategic
foresight of teams of empowered and engaged members of their organizational
ecosystems. We propose to use the
Structural Dynamics Strategic Leadership process to explicate the power of
Anticipatory Leadership through a combination of experiential learning, lecture
and interactive discussion.
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Characteristics
of
ANTICIPATORY
LEADERS
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Phases of
STRUCTURAL
DYNAMICS
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Futurist
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Exploring
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Strategist
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Discovering
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Integrator
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Embodying
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All
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Sustaining
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Here is how Anticipatory Leadership
and the Structural Dynamics Leadership process map:
We propose to structure our presentation
as follows:
1.
Introduction:
We articulate our approach to leadership (Anticipatory Leadership) and
outline the process we'll be using to frame the afternoon's work (Structural
Dynamics).
2.
Experiential Module:
The participants experience a way of investigating the tectonic tensions
and suspended equilibrium between the present and the future. Based on the Exploring phase of
Structural Dynamics, the characteristic of the Anticipatory Leader that is most
called into play here is that of Futurist.
3.
Proceeding: We
turn then to an explanation of how anticipatory leaders apply this experience
to discover strategies based on the future possibilities they have been
developing, embody the strategies within their organization, and sustain
the viability of the selected strategies (via implementation and monitoring).
4.
Wrap Up: We
finish with an interactive discussion of the learning that took place during
the session.
1. Introduction
A decision issue provides the
focus for a Structural Dynamics intervention. It is an issue of vital importance to the future of
the whole organization. We work
with clients in advance of the program to identify a decision issue that would
be highly relevant to the participants. Below is an example of a decision issue germane to the
design of life sustaining organizations:
What
kind of environment, technologies, policies and practices do we need to provide
for the people in our organization in order to succeed in an increasingly
complex and interconnected global economy?[iii]
We introduce the idea of Critical
Uncertainties, dynamic, high impact forces that are of substantial
consequence to the Decision Issue but highly uncertain regarding how they will
play out. Depending on the Decision Issue, climate change, the implications of
an aging population, or the political/economic power of women may be examples
of critical uncertainties.
Participants engage in a process of identifying and selecting the most
critical and most uncertain forces related to their decision issue.
Next, we introduce the Scenario
Archetypes and use this model to demonstrate that the critical
uncertainties they have selected can shape starkly different versions of the
future.
2. Experiential module
Participants, in scenario teams,
“live” in four
distinct scenarios of the future, grappling with how the critical uncertainties
have played out in their future world:
Status Quo: Tomorrow will look pretty much like today, except not as
good
Discipline: Very soon, lots of people will realize that we’ve all
got to pitch in to make long overdue and much needed investments
Breakdown: Everything is going to hell
Breakthrough: Utopia is just around
the corner
The teams explain the characteristics
of their world to the whole group and how their scenario world constitutes a
potential reality.
Participants learn that very
different futures are quite possible, driven by factors already in play in the
present. This enhanced openness to
alternative worldviews, encourages broader, more inclusive mindsets and
advances participants’ ability
to work effectively with others, particularly those who hold different
perspectives on the future.
3.
Proceeding
Based on the participants’ experience in the previous module, we
describe the how leaders use these world views to engage their organizations in
strategy development and implementation across an ecosystem. This presentation and interactive
dialogue considers how to use the future (in the form of divergent scenarios)
to guide strategic action, and how the development of forward looking plans
enables, and is enriched by, close ties across internal and external
organizational sub-systems and boundaries.
Discovering
Strategic
Pathways: How strategies derive from scenarios.
For the
sake of illustration, let’s continue to explore the decision
issue related to the design of life sustaining organizations described
above. Further, let’s assume
that the political and economic power of women has been chosen as one of the
critical uncertainties to analyze.
A scenario team living in a “Status Quo” future
will develop different strategies than one living in a “Breakthrough” future. For example, the former might
anticipate that prospective female executives will be found, primarily, in
women’s colleges and elite schools and plan their recruitment
initiatives built on that assumption.
The latter scenario group might believe that a flood of qualified women
are going to receive certificates of achievement from MOOC's[iv]
proliferating all over the planet and construct a recruitment program based on
that assumption.
We show how to use a strategy matrix
to evaluate all of the strategies developed by scenario teams.
The
matrix differentiates between robust, contingent and no-go strategies. Robust
strategies seem to work across all scenarios; contingent work in only one or a
few; No-go’s work in none.
Continuing with our illustration, attending to educational
developments would seem to be a robust strategy for the construction of
life sustaining organizations, regardless of the future that is unfolding, but
investing in research and achieving presence in the digital education market
place might be a contingent strategy relevant to only specific scenarios.
The emphasis on articulating and
evaluating strategies stimulates a comprehension of what it means to engage in
the contextual and strategic analysis of complex systems. It will challenge participants to start
thinking about how to work across the boundaries of future thinking, e.g., how
to navigate discussions with those who haven’t been thinking in the same
terms.
Embodying
Organizational Strategy by Integrating Networks: We now lay out an approach to
strategy implementation as a way of addressing the challenge of how to implement
a strategy process grounded in futures thinking. Our primary point here is that the real action will be in
the participants own leadership behavior is key to success. They must be the change.
For
example, what would it mean for each of them as executives in their organizational
contexts to act in a way that anticipated the full and equal empowerment of
women in their own organization?
Given current demographics, this might seem like a remote possibility. But, what if their strategic analysis
led them see that this seemingly distant prospect is going to become a reality
sooner than anyone might imagine? What
would that mean for them in their executive roles? What would they have to do to build support for strategies
that anticipate this possibility?
Sustaining Results
and Maintaining Momentum: We discuss the need to monitor outcomes of strategy
implementation, evaluate results and modify as necessary using the
scenarios.
Leaders
ask themselves: Are we on the right track? What changes occurring in the environment necessitate course
corrections? What internal and
external data confirm the path we’re on?
We provide three tools for monitoring
results: signposts, indicators and warning. Signposts mark changes within an organization that
result from a strategic direction (e.g., percentages of women in managerial
and/or technical positions).
Indicators reveal the impact of changes internally and externally (e.g.,
applications by women for open positions, increasingly aggressive recruitment
of women by competitors). Warnings
are events in the external environment that provide information regarding an
impending change toward a particular future condition (e.g., the election of a
political party opposed to the expansion of opportunities for working
women).
Certainly the men and women involved
in any leadership program will have their own rich ideas on how to sustain
movement toward strategic objectives.
This conversation will provide an opportunity to learn from the
knowledge in the room.
4.
Wrap Up: Anticipatory
Leaders Create Organizational Futures
Those of us involved in achieving inclusive, sustainable, value-based global growth are
concerned with the length of time it take for these systems to be
created and to demonstrate results. In The Innovators, Walter Isaacson
shows that interpersonal squabbles, inadequate inquiry structures,
organizational politics and miscalculations, and international geo-political
rigidities frequently put the brakes on innovation and even derailed it
completely -- for a century in the case of the computer.[v]
Executives and leaders throughout
organizations who know how to create strategic dialogue among divergent parties
achieve the best quality of thought, organizational learning, engagement and
results from their efforts. The
skills of futurist, strategist and integrator allow anticipatory leaders to
optimize the collective intelligence residing within their organizations. Like
the juggler, they are able to maintain strength, concentration and balance in
the face of demanding stimuli coming at them continuously from multiple
directions. This workshop will
provide an introduction to our ideas on developing these skills.
[i]
While not central to our presentation, a discussion of suspended equilibrium
in a short film on Moholy-Nagy can be found in SoL North America’s Meeting Room and may be of
interest to the reviewer.
[ii]
The approach presented here is laid out in the detailed discussion of various
technologies for futures thinking and scenario planning developed in our Life
Sustaining Organizations — A Design Guide
and other publications.
[iii] It is worth noting
that the war for talent is always more intense than we might suspect and is
likely to heat up under conditions of anything like a global economic
expansion. For example, the overall US unemployment rate is presently 5.7%, but
unemployment among college graduates is presently only 2%. Within some fields, there is virtually
no unemployment. Considerations
regarding what it takes to find, recruit and hold truly talented individuals
and team seems like it might be quite relevant topic for executives
participating in leadership development programs.
[iv]
MOOCs = Massive Open Online Courses
[v]
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2014/10/20/book-review-the-innovators-how-group-hackers-geniuses-and-geeks-created-digital-revolution-walter-isaacson/aY6Pt4CBTCwJYL0UhyUChK/story.htm
