The Future is a Leadership Decision
In the Beginning was the Future Part 3
By Rick Aman onWhy Leaders Must Choose What They Are Trying to Create
Over the past two weeks, I have written about futuring from two perspectives. The first began with walking into the new Future Tech Building at the College of Eastern Idaho and realizing that I was standing inside something that, years earlier, had existed only as an idea. The second addressed the question that naturally followed: How do you actually create a preferred future? I described a process for understanding the present, considering possible and probable futures, defining a Preferred Future, and then working backward to determine what we should begin doing today.
There is one more part of futuring that deserves attention, and perhaps it is the most important: the future is a leadership decision. Leaders certainly do not get to decide what the future will be. Markets change, technology advances, political and economic conditions shift, demographics change, and unexpected events intervene. Anyone who has led an organization knows how quickly circumstances nobody anticipated can disrupt a carefully developed plan. But that does not mean leaders are powerless in shaping what comes next. I have come to believe that one of the most important responsibilities of leadership is deciding what future is worth trying to create.
Every Organization Is Headed Toward a Future
During my years as a college president, I spent considerable time thinking about the future. Some of that was unavoidable. Higher education is constantly affected by forces outside its control: demographics, technology, workforce needs, and changing expectations from students and employers. The organization you lead today will not be the same one that exists five years from now. The important question is how much of that change will simply happen to the organization and how much will be influenced by choices its leaders make.
That became especially clear during the development of the College of Eastern Idaho. When the community voted in 2017 to create a community college, we were taking responsibility for an institution that did not yet exist. There was no established CEI culture or predetermined picture of what the college had to become. We had the unusual opportunity and responsibility to ask what Eastern Idaho would need from its community college in the years ahead. That experience reinforced something I now see working with governing boards and executive teams: every organization is headed toward a future whether its leaders deliberately think about that future or not. Today's decisions are already creating it. The people we hire, the technology we employ, the partnerships we form, and the buildings we construct have consequences beyond the current year. Even decisions we postpone shape what becomes possible later. The future, in that sense, is already under construction.
Leaders therefore face a choice. We can allow today's pressures and circumstances to largely determine where the organization eventually arrives, or we can develop a clear picture of where we would prefer to go and begin making decisions that increase the likelihood of getting there. The future will arrive. The leadership decision is whether we intentionally influence what that future becomes.
Leadership Is Not About Predicting the Future
One challenge with talking about the future is that conversation can quickly become an exercise in prediction. Leaders should pay attention to the forces shaping their environment. But the primary responsibility of leadership is not to correctly predict what happens next. I certainly could not have predicted everything that would happen during my years at CEI. We experienced leadership and legislative changes, technological developments, new partnerships, unexpected opportunities, and a global pandemic. Any detailed long-range plan developed at the beginning would have been obsolete long before we reached the end. Yet something important can remain relatively stable even as circumstances change: direction.
This is why I find the distinction between the possible, probable, and Preferred Future useful. The possible future asks what could happen if technologies, circumstances, or assumptions change. The probable future asks where current trends are taking us. They both matter, but neither represents the fundamental leadership decision. That comes with the preferred future. After considering what is likely and what is possible, leaders must ask a different question: Given what could happen, what future do we want to purposefully create?
That question moves the conversation from forecasting to agency. We cannot eliminate uncertainty or guarantee that the future we prefer will occur, but we can decide what we value, what kind of organization we want to become, what outcomes matter, and what direction is worth pursuing. Leadership does not require certainty about the future. It requires enough clarity about the destination to begin moving toward it.
Choosing a Preferred Future Is a Leadership Decision
This is where futuring becomes more than a planning exercise. A Preferred Future is not simply an attractive paragraph developed during a board retreat and inserted into a strategic plan. If it is meaningful, it represents choices, and choices are where leadership becomes consequential.
Defining a Preferred Future requires leaders to move beyond describing what they hope will happen and decide what they actually intend to pursue. It creates a destination against which priorities, resources, and opportunities can be considered. Without that clarity, organizations can become extraordinarily busy launching initiatives, responding to immediate needs, and pursuing new opportunities without being certain that all of that activity is moving them in the same direction. I have often said that clarity precedes progress, and futuring has reinforced that conviction for me.
Once leaders become clear about the future they are trying to create, the nature of the conversation changes. What do we want to become known for? Resources are finite, as are leadership attention and organizational capacity. Choosing a Preferred Future means choosing among competing possibilities. Some investments will become more important, while others may need to wait. Some opportunities will move the organization toward its future, while attractive alternatives may not. Longstanding programs or traditions may even need to be reconsidered. This is why creating a Preferred Future requires more than vision. Vision becomes meaningful only when it begins influencing choices.
Lead from the Future, Not Just the Present
Today, as I work with governing boards and executive teams, I see how difficult this can be. Leaders live under the gravitational pull of the present. There is always a budget issue, operational problem, new regulation, or unexpected challenge requiring attention. Responsible leaders cannot ignore those realities. But if every leadership conversation begins and ends with today's problems, the present eventually becomes the architect of the future. A Preferred Future gives leaders another place from which to make decisions. Instead of looking only from today toward tomorrow, we can occasionally stand conceptually in the future we are trying to create and look backward. From that vantage point, today's choices can look different. A partnership that seems optional may become essential. A technology investment that appears expensive may become foundational. A longstanding program may no longer contribute to where the organization is going. An opportunity that does not fit today's organization may fit perfectly with the organization we are trying to become.
During the development of CEI, strategies changed many times. They had to. People, circumstances, opportunities, and the environment changed. But the larger picture of what the college could become and what it could mean for Eastern Idaho provided continuity. Strategy could adapt without abandoning the destination. That may be one of the most important lessons of futuring: direction should provide continuity while strategy provides adaptability. A Preferred Future does not provide a detailed map of the next five years. It provides something more useful: a North Star against which today's decisions can be considered. Governing strategy can all be evaluated by asking one recurring question: Does this move us toward our Preferred Future? Over time, that question can become a leadership discipline.
Three weeks ago, I began this series with the experience of standing inside a future we had once only imagined. Last week, I described how leaders can begin creating a Preferred Future by looking beyond the present, defining a destination, working backward, and then acting forward. The final point may be the simplest: someone has to choose to lead toward it.
The responsibility of leadership is not to predict the future perfectly. It is to see possibilities, remain grounded in purpose, choose a future worth pursuing, and make today's decisions in light of tomorrow's destination. So perhaps the question to take into your next board or executive team meeting is this: Are your most important decisions primarily helping you manage the organization you have today, or create the organization you intend to become tomorrow?
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The future is not something leaders can predict with certainty, but it is something they can intentionally influence. For governing boards, that begins by asking: What organization are we trying to become? Through Aman & Associates, I can facilitate a focused two-hour Zoom session with your board or executive team to help define that Preferred Future and the strategic direction needed to pursue it. The future will arrive; leadership determines how intentionally we meet it.
Rick Aman, PhD | Aman & Associates