Master Strategic Foresight How Far Into the Future Are You Really Thinking

So what are these capabilities, capacities, competencies that we need to look at? And like I said, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions so that we can explore what this means. The first one is, think about the last important decision you made. Pause for a moment and think about the last important big decision you made in your personal life, in your professional career, or something, a big decision made in the company or organization that you're working in. It's a big decision, but how far into the future did you actually consider its consequences? Were you thinking, this is the right decision for— we need to make this decision now? Is this the right decision for the next quarter because we'll get sales, we'll get profits, we'll be able to do something? Is this the right decision for next year for the next set of leaders who will take over from these particular leaders? And those questions about how far into the future we are thinking is really important because that is the competency of strategic foresight. It is to anticipate what may emerge and to consider what we're doing today and its long-term consequences. In the so-called, broadly speaking, Western world, there is what they call— I love these words that people just make up— quarteritis. It is the tendency for companies to make decisions based on next quarter, the next, like Q2, Q3. What is going to be the bottom line? What are the KPIs that we have to report on in the next 3 months? And that is what the focus is, to do something now for then. In the broadly speaking Eastern world, there is an appreciation for something that happens over a much longer period of time. And one of my favorite stories is about an old bonsai master craftsman. And it takes a very long time from when you plant a bonsai seed or sapling for it to grow to maturity before you can start really working with it as a bonsai plant. to creating something amazing. And those bonsais last for— they can last for hundreds of— I mean, they're just small trees, but they can last for hundreds of years. But this one bonsai master was still planting seeds and saplings when he was in his late 80s. He would never see those plants mature, but this was part of what he did. He saw the foresight of other people being able to take those plants onto maturity. How far ahead are we thinking? And we might think that because we've got like a savings plan and a retirement annuity plan that we're okay, but we really need to kind of stretch our thinking about how we are looking at the future. When we look at futures thinking, it's, that's the phrase we very often use when we talk about what a futurist does. And I like to say that everybody's a natural futurist because we're all thinking about the future. I mean, you're on this webinar right now because You want to learn something because you think it will have value for the future. So you're all natural futurists. The more academic name for it is strategic foresight. But if we just brought it down to a competency, strategic foresight is this intention to consider the future and to see what— to anticipate what may emerge and not to just believe that our hopes and dreams and wishes will come true and not to just hope that we've made a plan and that that plan will work or that we're really competent, so we're sure we can improvise in the moment. That, that isn't strategic foresight. That's, that's just really wishful thinking.