Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
A bit about me
1999-2005 Managed their planning/quality units Long and good career in CAEs, TAFE, universities 2005-2007
2007.integrating long term thinking into strategy development, using futures approaches
Integral Framework
Interior Exterior Leadership
Options
Decisions
Actions
Convergent
Pragmatic Deductive
Creating Alignment
Strategic Thinking
Strategic thinking is about developing strategy. Strategy is about the future.
ergo Strategic Thinking is thinking about the future.
Strategic Thinking
Integrating the future into your decision making processes today by thinking big, deep and long.
Big do we understand how we connect and interact with other organisations and the external environment?
Deep how deeply are we questioning our ways of operating? Do we operate from our interpretation of the past, or our anticipation of the future? Are our assumptions today valid into the future?
Long how far into the future are we looking? Do we understand the shape of alternative futures for our organisation?
Strategic thinking is identifying, imagining and understanding possible and plausible future operating environments for your organisation
and using that knowledge to expand your thinking about your potential future options
Thinking Deep
Worldview
What might seem real to you probably wont seem as real to the next person.
not right, not wrong, just is.
How you filter information (your lens) to create meaning is critical to understand.
You will know when to test assumptions when the pain of continuing with business-as-usual is greater than the fear of challenging yourself and others.
In education
Creating graduates for jobs that dont exist, using technology that hasnt been invented, to solve problems that havent happened.
Must understand the shape of this world to be able to lead towards it.
Globalisation
Global Wild card Industry Learning Educational Gaming Online Technology
Environment
Economy Politics
Wild card
UNCERTAINTY
High Usual Planning Timeframe (3-5 years)
The linear future is the one we believe to be true, usually based on untested assumptions Trend Linear Future Low Today TIME Future
UNCERTAINTY
High Usual Planning Timeframe (3-5 years)
Possible Futures
UNCERTAINTY
High
Possible Futures
Trends
Putting it all together: What might be and what can we do about it today?
Types of Futures
Wildcard Scenario
Possible
Today
Time
Futures Cone developed by Clem Bezold
The future might be unknowable, but you can understand a lot about what will influence the future.
SNACK CULTURE
Photo: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com
Implications
Students how will they learn, what will their experience look like? Staff how will you work, what will a day look like for you? The organisation how will it have changed? How will it have stayed the same? Learning what will it mean (structure, delivery, assessment, recognition)? Industry what will it look like? How will people work? What skills might be needed?
Reactive Futures
Proactive Futures
PROACTIVE FUTURES Lets think about how to focus our organisations on the future.
Proactive Futures What is happening? What is driving the trends that will influence our future?
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
What assumptions that underpin how you think about your work now will need to change?
The pressures of his job drive the manager to be superficial in his actions to overload himself with work, encourage interruption, respond quickly to every stimulus, seek the tangible and avoid the abstract, makes decisions in small increments, and do everything abruptly.
Henry Mintzberg The Managers Job: Folklore or Fact, HBR, 1975
Managers who get caught in the trap of overwhelming demands become prisoners of routine. They do not have time to notice opportunities. Their habituated work prevents them from taking the first necessary step toward harnessing willpower: developing the capacity to dream an idea into existence and transforming it into a concrete existence.
Heike Bruch & Sumantra Ghoshal, A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time, HBSP, 2004
The Result?
Our organisations will tend to be purposeless wastelands, populated by the perpetually busy and the inherently unhappy.
actually means
I can only think short term, not long term. I dont have time to think strategically.
If you succumb to the busyness syndrome, this is how you approach the future.
A futures thinking approach may mitigate against falling into the trap of being caught reacting to the day to day, where the urgent drives out the important, where the futures goes unexplored and the capacity to act, rather than the capacity to think and imagine, becomes the sole measure for leadership.
Brent Davies Leading the Strategically Focused School: Success and Sustainability (2006)
Open mind
Systems thinker
Accept diversity
Curious
Challenge assumptions
Are compassionate
and generous
Your turn
Focus: critical issue/decision today Scan: two trends likely to affect your decision into the future (think uncertainty not predictability) Interpret: think about how these trends might play out over the next 10 years Imagine: how your organisation look like in 10 years image/metaphor/book or movie title Decision: implications/options for your decision today. What will be the same, what might you do differently?
Back to Work
Strategic thinking is thinking about the future. As leaders in organisations, your responsibility is to influence others to understand the imperative of the future.
Its a challenge!
The gap between reactive and proactive futures is bridged by making time for strategic thinking..
Individual Foresight
Individuals recognise and build their foresight capacity
Strategic Foresight
conscious
Individuals begin to talk about and use futures approaches in their work
unconscious
implicit
Collective individual capacities generate organisational capacity (structures & processes)
explicit
solitary
collective
YOU
Interior Reflective Practice Commit to building time to do this daily stop doing something else if you have to Exterior Leadership Make a change in your routine when you go back to work. Individual
Collective Good Ancestory Recognise the impact of decisions today for future generations Strategic Thinking Whenever you have to make a decision, ask: Am I thinking, big, deep and long?
Exterior
YOUR ORGANISATION
Leadership Build a scanning system to inform decision making and pay attention to it Individual
Collective Good Ancestory Create a futures focused decision making culture Strategic Thinking
Strategic Thinking = integrating the future into your decision making today.
The aim is to understand - as best we can - the long term context of our decisions today, so that we make those decisions as wise and as robust as is possible.