By Thornton May

Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Paul Krugman, economics professor at Princeton University, Op-Ed columnist at the New York Times and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for economics, counsels key policy makers that, “being a grown-up means planning for the future.” I recently queried a set of thought leaders asking, “In today’s digitally disrupted world, what exactly does/what should ‘planning for the future’ look like?”

My preliminary research revealed the not unsurprising data point that planning and those who plan are not high on anyone’s list right now. The data is unambiguous. Very few organizations have shown themselves proficient at prospicience - the act of looking forward. Some are considered iconically bad at this task. 

Think about what happened at Wang, Data General, Prime, Kodak, Polaroid, Lucent, Nortel, Compaq, Gateway, Lotus, Ashton Tate, Borland, Novell, Eastern Airlines, Businessweek, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, Tower Records, Borders, Blockbuster and Montgomery Ward. These weren’t just any organizations. They were industry leading, celebrated-by-the-business-media, feted-at-name-brand-business-schools heroes. And they are all gone-because in my opinion they did not see “future” as a verb - as in to future: to proactively adapt the organization to the exigencies of the future.

The iconically poor future planners cited above probably treated “future” as an adjective, as in any course correction they contemplated was “too future” [i.e., too far outside the enterprise’s comfort zone].

Where Many Organizations Go Wrong

A frequently made planning mistake is to view “future” as a noun [i.e., a place like Cleveland]. This faulty model frequently leads to the erroneous belief that success hinges on predicting what/where the future will be. This is madness – expensive folly. Al Toffler, my former boss and author of Future Shock, counseled previous generations of world leaders that the future “arrives at the wrong time, in the wrong order and that no straight-line extrapolation is ever accurate.”  

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen concurs, suggesting, “Stop trying to predict the trajectories of disruptive technologies because predictions just won’t work.” Not so very long ago, the editorial staff at Forbes advised, “When you get the urge to predict the future, you better lie down until the feeling goes away.” If we can’t extrapolate and we can’t predict, what options remain open to future-focused executives charged with planning for the future?

Barbra Cooper the emeritus CIO at Toyota Motor USA made treating “future” as a verb a mandatory competence for her direct reports.  She recently shared how the “plan” for the future of IT at Toyota came together with executives at the CIO Solutions Gallery at THE Ohio State University.

Barbra recounts the story of how she would talk in staff meetings about provocative constructs of what she thought the organization and process of IT in the future needed to look like. Her staff would nod their heads declaiming, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s cool.” Barbra, believing that she had articulated the plan for the future concluded saying, “We need to start to do X.” She sent her very competent staff off to do “X.” 

Six months later, there was no X. It dawned on Barbra that the “from the brain of the one at the top” planning was not working. Placing this in the context of her being a child of the sixties, Barbra chuckled that with regards to planning for the future, “you can’t share your trip.”

A best practice of firms who are good at futuring is to make sure the vision going forward is personalized by the staff. At Toyota, rather than having the plan for the future spring fully formed from a C-Suite executive’s fecund brow, the organization concluded that the plan for the future had to be personalized by the staff. With this in mind, then-CIO Cooper assembled her A-team in a conference room and told them,

“Ok, we are going to take five minutes. I want you to think out three years. I want you to pretend that you are driving into the parking lot. You are walking into your office. You are going to go through your day. You are going to have your first meeting of the day. You are talking to somebody in the door. You go and get your coffee. You have a series of hallway conversations. You are thinking about some of the things and the problems you have. I want you to play out – almost like a storyboard in your head – what is going to be different? For you?”

What emerged from this very simple exercise provided a solid foundation for moving the enterprise forward.

Tell us in the comments, how do you plan for the future?