Creating the Preferred Future
In the Beginning was the Future Part 2
By Rick Aman onHow Boards and Executive Teams Turn Futuring into a Leadership Discipline
“The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.” Leonard I. Sweet
Last week I wrote about what it feels like to stand inside a future that once existed only as an idea. The Future Tech Building at the College of Eastern Idaho provided a very tangible example. Years earlier, there was no building. There were ideas, conversations, possibilities, and eventually a shared vision of something that could exist. Last week, we walked through its doors at the ribbon cutting. Several people responded to that story and particularly to the idea of futuring. Their comments led naturally to another question: How do you actually do it?
I have spent much of my career thinking about that question, first as a college president working with governing boards and executive teams and now as a consultant helping organizations think about their own futures. Over time, I have become convinced that futuring requires a somewhat different way of thinking about strategy. It does not replace strategic planning, but it changes where the planning begins. Traditional planning usually begins with the organization we have today and asks how we can improve it. Futuring begins farther out. It asks what organization we want to become and then works backward to determine what we should begin doing today.
The Hardest Part Is Getting Out of the Present
One of the things I have noticed when working with boards and planning teams is how difficult it can be to escape the gravitational pull of the present. Put 10 leaders in a room and ask them to talk about the future, and before long the conversation often returns to the budget, staffing, facilities, competition, technology, or whatever issue dominated the last board meeting. That is understandable. Leaders are responsible for the organization that exists today, and those issues are real. But there is also a danger in allowing today's realities to establish the boundaries of what we can imagine for tomorrow. We can become so immersed in managing what is that we have difficulty seeing what could be.
That is why I usually begin futuring by helping leaders understand the present without asking them to plan from it. Tools such as SWOT and PESTEL can be useful. So can examining demographic trends, emerging technologies, disruptions, and what I sometimes describe as colliding technological S-curves; one way of doing things beginning to decline just as something new is accelerating. The purpose of this work is not to predict the future. It is to understand the forces that may shape it.
Once we have looked carefully at the environment, the conversation can move beyond today's organization to what I describe as the three futures. The probable future asks: What is likely to happen if we do nothing different? If today's trends and momentum continue, where are they likely to take us? The possible future asks: What could be? What new opportunities, technologies, disruptions, or changing assumptions might create futures different from the one we currently expect? But neither is the central question of futuring. That comes when we consider the Preferred Future and ask: What do we want the future to be? Of all the futures that could emerge, what future do we want to help create?
I have watched the nature of a conversation change when a board begins seriously considering that question. Leaders stop merely forecasting what might happen to them and begin discussing what they want to make happen. We cannot control the future, but neither are we simply passengers waiting for it to arrive. Futuring gives leaders a degree of agency by asking them to identify a future worth pursuing.
Begin at the Destination and Work Backward
Once a board begins looking beyond the present, the next challenge is to make that Preferred Future clear enough that people can actually see it. I generally ask organizations to look three to five years ahead. Ten years can become speculation, while next year tends to pull us immediately back into operational planning. Three to five years creates useful distance. It is far enough away that meaningful change is possible but close enough that today's board and leadership team can begin influencing it. This is where questions become particularly powerful.
If we were standing in our organization three years from now and the future had developed the way we hoped, what would be different? What would our students, customers, patrons, members, or community be experiencing that they do not experience today? What would we have become known for? What would people be saying about us? The goal is not to predict exactly what the organization will look like. We cannot. The goal is to make the destination sufficiently clear that people can begin seeing the same future.
This is also where I have found three simple words particularly helpful: Why, What, and How. Purpose establishes why the organization exists and why the future matters. The Preferred Future describes what the organization intends to become. Strategy then determines how we begin moving from where we are today toward that destination. The order is important because leaders naturally want to move quickly to the how. We are comfortable with action. We want initiatives, goals, timelines, budgets, assignments, and measures. All of those things eventually matter, but I have learned that an organization can be extraordinarily busy without necessarily making meaningful progress. That is one reason I frequently return to a simple principle: clarity precedes progress. If the destination is unclear, more activity may simply get us somewhere faster without knowing whether it is where we wanted to go.
Once the Preferred Future becomes sufficiently clear, however, the conversation changes again. We can begin standing conceptually in that future and looking backward toward today. If this is where we intend to be three years from now, what must be true for that future to exist? What capabilities must we develop? What might we need to stop doing? What must we begin doing? What relationships, partnerships, investments, or staffing will become important? From those questions, a relatively small number of strategic initiatives usually begin to emerge. Those initiatives create the bridge between today's organization and tomorrow's Preferred Future.
We still will not know every step along the way, nor should we expect to. Circumstances will change, technology will change, leadership may change, and opportunities will emerge that no planning process could have anticipated. What matters is having enough clarity about the destination that we can recognize the right next step when we see it. In that sense, futuring asks leaders to do something that initially seems backward: begin at the destination, work backward toward the present, and then act forward toward the future.
When the Preferred Future Becomes a Leadership Discipline
Perhaps the greatest danger in any planning process occurs after the retreat. Everyone leaves encouraged by the conversation. Someone produces a polished document. It is presented at a board meeting, perhaps placed on the website or stored in a shared drive, and gradually the organization returns to business as usual. A Preferred Future becomes valuable only when it begins influencing decisions.
The CEI experience I wrote about last week reinforced this for me. The journey from the creation of the college to the opening of Future Tech was never governed by a detailed plan extending nearly a decade into the future. Such a plan would have become obsolete long before the building opened. Presidents changed. Trustees changed. Governors and legislators changed. Technology evolved. New partnerships developed, and opportunities emerged that we could not have anticipated when the college was created. Strategies changed as well, and they should have. Strategy must be able to adapt to circumstances. What provided continuity was a larger picture of what CEI could become and what it could mean for Eastern Idaho. That picture allowed successive boards and leaders to keep asking a relatively simple question: Does this move us toward our Preferred Future? Over time, that question can become a leadership discipline. The Preferred Future becomes more than a destination. It becomes a filter through which important decisions can be considered.
That is why I increasingly think of futuring as a cycle rather than an event. We understand the present, explore possible futures, define the Preferred Future, work backward, act forward, and then reassess. The environment changes, assumptions change, and new information becomes available, so we periodically look outward again and ask whether our understanding of the future has changed. The Preferred Future provides direction without pretending that leaders can predict the road. I think this distinction is particularly important for governing boards. Management understandably spends much of its time operating in the present. Boards have a different responsibility. Good governance certainly requires stewardship of the organization that exists today, but stewardship also carries responsibility for the organization that will exist tomorrow. Boards therefore need occasions when they deliberately lift their eyes beyond today's agenda and today's problems and ask where the organization is going. Futuring does not give them certainty about what will happen. It gives them clarity about the future they are trying to create. That clarity may be increasingly valuable in an environment where technology, demographics, economics, and social expectations can change faster than even a well-developed strategic plan can accommodate. We cannot know precisely what the next three to five years will bring, but we can decide what we value, what kind of organization we want to become, and what future is worth pursuing. Then we can begin making today's decisions in light of tomorrow's destination.
Last week I wrote about the unusual privilege of eventually standing inside a future we had once only imagined. But long before anyone can stand inside a Preferred Future, someone has to see it, leaders have to describe it clearly enough for others to see it too, and an organization has to begin making choices that move toward it. Perhaps, then, the question for your next board or executive team meeting is not simply, “What should we do next?” A better question might be: “Are we spending most of our time managing the organization we have, or are we also creating the organization we intend to become?”
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Aman & Associates helps boards and executive teams move beyond managing the present to creating their Preferred Future. A focused two-hour Zoom session can introduce your leadership team to strategic futuring and help you begin seeing your organization’s future differently. Sometimes a few hours and the right questions are enough to change the direction of the conversation.
Rick Aman, PhD | Aman & Associates rick@rickaman.com | rickaman.com