What’s going on here?
Let’s get right to that first level of future work: building a shared model of reality. This is where you move from implicit to explicit work on the future.
Strategist Richard Rumelt has suggested that all strategy work can be broken down into three steps - the first is the diagnosis, the second is the search for a global policy to address the challenge or crux of the diagnosis and the third is consistent actions that support that policy and the strategy.
Good futures work shares a lot with strategy work, but most importantly it shares that first step - the diagnosis. In order to know where we are heading, we really must know where we are on the map. Orienting ourselves in any futures work requires that we spend time understanding the current state of affairs.
Rumelt notes that this comes down to a surprisingly simple question: what’s going on here?
How do we best answer this question? We have to step back and look at our industry, society, the company from the outside, and then break the question down into sub-questions.
One common way of doing this is to break it down into the following categories:
Political. What is happening in the political world? Start from the macro-perspective: what is the political mood? The key trends? When we are writing right now the key terms used to describe politics are words like “polarization” and “nostalgia” - but what does that mean? Try to describe how this macro-perspective affects actions and decisions of politicians, and what patterns of decision making you can see emerge, how preferences are rank-ordered. Moving on to the meso-level discuss your industry, the section of society that you are engaged with and how that is embedded in or divorced from the political mood. And then look at the micro-level of how politics directly impact your company in different ways.
Economic. Here we look at the overall economic trends, the possibility of recession, the economic mood and the key narratives. Narrative economics provides a helpful tool here, as developed by Schiller and others. If you can detail the key stories told in economics, and how they are repeated and amplified you will find that very helpful. What does the job market look like? What are the growth prospects? Again, go through the macro-meso-micro distinction and explore closely.
Social. This is where you look at people more closely. Look first at the statistical dimensions - demographics especially - but also crime, sentiment and social challenges. One of the most powerful polling questions belongs here: do you think your kids will be better off than you are? Exploring the public mood, social trends and behaviors will be important in this chapter.
Technological. This is perhaps more straightforward, but look not only at the state of technology, but work to figure out possible roadmaps across 6, 12, 18 months – what is happening and what are the major changes? What are people undervaluing and overvaluing? A key reminder here is to move beyond the hype and try to understand real technology diffusion patterns. Technology develops along two different dimensions: use and capability. Capabilities may grow quickly, but unless they are used they matter little for what happens in the world. The use-capability gap is a key factor to keep in mind: if you try to envision the future on the basis of just one of these dimensions you will ultimately fail.
Legal. Changes in legislation, pending regulation and regulatory investigations shape the landscape and markets in a much more thorough way than is usually understood.
Environmental. With climate change and extreme weather, it seems obvious that climate is something to take into account, but many working with the future discount it, because of the perceived slow burn and the slow rate of change. This means that you can probably find some interesting insights by looking at changes brought about in this space.
The examples above are just a few. You will most likely have your own, and moving through these categories, incessantly asking “what is going on here” and writing down the answer is the key. And remember that writing this down really requires that you write down a narrative, not just bullet points. We return to this point again and again, but it cannot be stressed enough: you do not have an answer unless you have written it down and shared it with others. It may be an oversimplification, but one key product of futures work is the stories we write down.
Once you have this diagnosis, you should share it with others. If you are really serious, you will pick a small team where everyone will write their own diagnosis, and you will compare, contrast and discuss - and then merge the narratives into one (pro-tip: assign a single writer for that, do not write by committee).
The value of producing this will be immediate in that it helps you build your shared model of reality - but the greater value will be when you return to the diagnosis in 6 months time to explore if it really made sense, what you missed and where you were right.
Drawing the business
Another way of building a shared model of reality is to simply draw the business. This can be done with organizations as well, and the method is really simple: you ask a key team to individually draw a model of what it is you do and what is going on here. The drawn model is then used for a discussion about how best to model your work and the mission you are engaged in.
A version of this that one of us tried for a leadership exercise was to ask the leadership team to break up into smaller groups and make a game that represented what you are doing and the environment you are doing it in – what is going here, in short. Provided with plenty of paper, pens, glue and all the trappings of a kindergarten day of crafts, the teams went of and constructed different games.
The advantage of this approach is that a game has some key mechanics: you have to have a way to keep score, you have to have a winning condition and you have to model the adversity that you take on in the game. This means that it is a bit less open ended than that drawing challenge – and it helps crystallize action in an interesting way.
The games that resulted were very different: one was about building connections across a series of different stakeholders, much like a railroad building game. Another was about occupying certain commanding heights on a field, so a point-domination game. A third was a sequential version of shutes and ladders and the last was more like an imitation game where the players tried to convince each-other what a random image looked like. All provided great insights into the work, the challenges and the ways of keeping score.
Top three challenges
If you are really pressed for time and want to try to build a shared model, a first step can be to ask everyone in the team to write down what they think the top three challenges are that they are working to solve. A version is to ask for the top three questions they want answers to. Then compare the different answers and discuss. This is a cheap and easy way to get a discussion started, and we find that it works well in those groups that are convinced that they already have a shared model of reality - but have yet to find out that they do have models of reality, but they are in no way, shape or form actually shared.
Horizons - how long is your future?
Another calibration exercise that is often helpful, and where the outcome might actually not be a shared view, but an understanding for the necessarily different views of different individuals, is to ask how long their future is. This question seeks to understand in what space they are looking for a future edge, how long their horizons are and how that is related to what they perceive their role and mission to be within the organization.
This can be very different. One of us was once asked by a very senior leader what we were working on, and after have heard the answer shook their head:
“All of those things are due in the next 6 months. If you are working on them, who is thinking about what happens after those 6 months? You should have hired a leadership team that worries about that, and you should think about what happens once they have solved those problems”, they said.
And the higher up in an organization you are, or the more focused on strategic advantage you are, the longer your horizon should be. A good question to ask before you join an organization is if their CEO is focused on the next 6 months, and if so why.
In addition to division of labor, we now must have a division of horizons as well if we are serious about the future.
Lesson
A shared model of reality, built through robust diagnosis, focused on the question what is going on here is a key first step in all futures work.
Break down the question and write out a story about what is going on here - no bullets - stories force cohesion and logic.
Explore shared models through models, drawing, making games et cetera - this will help make it a tangible experience.
Understand the division of horizons in a company and how it affects your work.