Many people have a hard time understanding what “futures studies” is all about. For exploring how your strategic context may change, futures methods can help to capture, bound, and understand the inherent and inescapable uncertainty of the future . This supports a strategic process by accounting for the following five points:
- New strategies will play out in the future, not in the past. A futures focus explores the uncertain and changing environment in which current and future strategies will be implemented. This is crucial to preventing the traps of “the generals fighting the last war” or “we don’t know what to do so we’ll do what we know.”
- Humans generally do a poor job estimating the pace of change. Looking out to a more distant time horizon gives people permission to think about seemingly long-term possibilities that may actually occur over the short- or medium-term. Given how much the pace of change has accelerated in recent decades, limiting one’s view to the actual planning horizon will leave the organization vulnerable to surprise.
- “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Although John Maynard Keynes used these words to motivate short-term fiscal policy, they also point to a benefit of futures work. Focusing on a longer-term future allows people to think beyond their immediate concerns of rank, status, responsibility, and next year’s budget. This also invites the type of visionary and strategic thinking that can drive significant organizational change in the present, directed toward the achievement of visionary outcomes.
- The goal is not just to not lose, but to win. Thousands of years of evolution have – through the survival of species – disproportionately rewarded the avoidance of danger over the exploitation of opportunity. Similarly, in our decision-making processes we often find ourselves choosing from a set of unpalatable options, rather than envisioning the success we would like to achieve. Explicitly exploring visionary futures – in addition to challenging futures – ensures that emerging opportunities are spotted in time to be exploited, so that the bad does not overwhelm the good.
- You have more options in visioning and long-term strategy than you do in “risk analysis” or “contingency planning.” A futures perspective allows one to identify a larger toolkit for designing and implementing strategy by removing the short-term mentality that is often an artificially imposed limitation on strategic choices.
