Telling the future is a practise best left to the circus tent, but as strategists we are doing it all the time.
The question is not how to avoid being wrong, which means you do exactly nothing, but how do you both increase your odds of being right, and be able to pick very early when you are going to be wrong.
The leadership task to be able to play in the future is to decrease the natural discomfort people have with change, to seek ways to reduce the power of the status quo, look for opposing views that deviate from those that currently drive decision making, and ensure there is diversity of ideas and types in the environment.
Building a resilient marketing and innovation culture is at the core of this challenge. This recent Gartner report covers the challenges well, observing:
‘Innovation is well funded and maturing as a marketing discipline. CMO’s are dedicating head count to innovation and leaning on ecosystems to help accelerate initiatives. despite the progress, obstacles remain, most notably risk-averse corporate cultures’.
None of this is easy. It requires active engagement with the threats you see on the horizon, not just from your immediate environment, but from the wider field that may influence your enterprise in the future. It is being able to see threats as the opportunities they can be.
As a leader in this sort of change environment you have to be able to make it safe to be wrong, to encourage the pursuit of rabbits down burrows, to learn quickly, and adjust on the run, unlearn the ways that have been successful in the past, and replace them with less proven ideas and processes.
To my mind, curiosity, the absence of fear, and the leveraging of data, are the key ingredients in all this.
Curiosity is a word that encompasses all sorts of things, from critical thinking to creativity and discovery skills, and so called ‘design thinking’ which is just a fancy term for starting with a clean sheet of paper to design something new from scratch, completely from the end users perspective, while leveraging the best parts of what currently exists. To make all this happen in an organisation also requires that there is a collegial culture, as nobody can do it on their own, you need teams and networks of collaborators to succeed in todays world.
The second component of predicting the unpredictable is data. Data can reveal patterns, correlations, cause an effect relationships that when seen through a new lens can deliver imaginative insights. It is also true that we have no chance of predicting what an individual might do tomorrow, but assemble a number of similar people together, and we can have a very clear picture of what the majority of them might do tomorrow, and a calculation of the odds of outliers.
The third, which Hugh McLeod nails, again, in the www.gapingvoid.com header cartoon. Innovation is the absence of fear, and only in the absence of fear can we be sufficiently curious and empowered to predict the unpredictable, and bet on it.
