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Learning organisation
Making future thinking a key part of day-to-day problem solving and decision-making is an ideal way to create a learning organization. Holding occasional executive sessions on the future of the organization is less than ideal and can be dangerous if management is not alive to ever-changing opportunities and threats.
On the strategic front the executive need to be alive to the possibilities of they, or their rivals, choosing a different time and place to play from everyone else. Future thinking helps identify these new playing fields and those likely to play on them.
Futures exercises need not be time-consuming or resource intensive, and can take a variety of forms engaging the whole organization rather than just the leadership team.
Exercises
Meetings
Leadership agendas to consider the conclusions of these exercises might ask these open-ended questions:
Or they might be more open-ended questions such as:
Next: Learning from the Past Back: Imagining the Future To: Shaping Tomorrow
Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
On the strategic front the executive need to be alive to the possibilities of they, or their rivals, choosing a different time and place to play from everyone else. Future thinking helps identify these new playing fields and those likely to play on them.
Futures exercises need not be time-consuming or resource intensive, and can take a variety of forms engaging the whole organization rather than just the leadership team.
Exercises
- Collecting reports, plans, program descriptions
- Focus groups
- Participant action approaches
- Ethnographic study
- Anecdotes
- Case study analysis
- Oral histories
- Futuring exercises
- Visualization maps
- Organizational health checks
- Accessing networks (yours and others)
- Job rotation of researchers and line people
- Systematically analyzing customer complaints and idea schemes
- Monitoring the venture capital market and start-up firms
- Executive programs for constantly discovering stakeholder ideas
- Experiential virtual world programs; Second Life, YouTube
- Foresight/Google mashups
Meetings
Leadership agendas to consider the conclusions of these exercises might ask these open-ended questions:
- What conclusions can we draw from the exercise(s)?
- How might the future be different?
- What certainties/uncertainties are implied in the conclusions?
- How does A affect B?
- What is likely to remain the same or change significantly?
- What are the likely outcomes?
- What and who will likely shape our future?
- Where could we be most affected by change?
- What might we do about it?
- What don't we know that we need to know?
- What should we do now, today?
- Why do we care?
- When should we aim to meet again on this?
Or they might be more open-ended questions such as:
- If I could answer any question for you, what would it be?
- If you looked back from 10 years hence, and told the triumph in the ____ space, what would it be?
- If you looked back from 10 years hence, and told the failure in the ______ space, what would it be?
- What does the _______ space need to forget?
- What are one or two critical strategic decisions regarding the __________ space on the horizon?
- What are the top 2 or 3 trends driving the future of the ______ space?
- What are the obstacles to progress in the ________ space?
- What should I have asked that I didn’t? (at the end).
- How Often?: Tomorrow Project
Next: Learning from the Past Back: Imagining the Future To: Shaping Tomorrow
Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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Latest page update: made by sunfirejewels
, Apr 16 2009, 10:18 PM EDT
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