Beware of the Magpies
As a Futurist I’m often asked to disrupt the thinking of Execs and Boards as part of their strategic planning.
However progress doesn’t require disrupting your thinking.
Instead focus on lifting it.
If you think about how disruption works, it’s not actually about disruption. In business disruption doesn’t occur quickly resulting in chaos, which is what the term implies.
Instead it’s about a slow-moving change – typically over a decade or more as technology matures and the impact of the next generation increases. Which doesn’t result in disruption but instead a gradual shift in the system of an industry from one pattern to another.
In other words, fast change happens slowly.
The objective with your strategic visioning and planning for the new year ahead shouldn’t be to disrupt your team’s thinking – as no-one really likes to be disrupted, even though they’re happy to disrupt others. Instead inspire and lift your team’s thinking above their current patterns of beliefs and behaviour to be able to see the changes ahead.
The key to mindflexing like this is to look for new patterns not disruption.
Which leads me to the magpies...
Like magpies, humans are also attracted to shiny objects. Robots, artificial intelligence, data, digital, automation – we get distracted by the obvious, missing far greater insight hidden just beyond the surface.
Let’s run a quick Futuready experiment to see what I mean:
Netflix. Uber. Spotify.
Name the founders of all three.
As a Futurist I predict you can’t easily. But now cast your mind back four decades (!) and chances are you can far more readily name the founders of Apple and Microsoft.
Why? It’s what I call the Magpie Syndrome.
While strategic planning meetings are filled with predictable conversations about shiny objects, the conversation too rarely goes beyond the obvious. To explore and discuss the strategic thinking that fuelled their growth.
It’s an easy… and very difficult... shift to make. Let’s do it now:
Using your cloud-enabled brain (Google, Siri, Bixby etc) name all three. Now how long did that take?
However it’s not about making this brain pivot as a one-off experiment. It’s about building a Futuready habit by transforming your mindset to a Mindflex.
The difference is profound. For example in your next strategy discussion try thinking like Netflix founder Reed Hastings by inspiring your team to go beyond talking simplistically about data and personalisation. Instead lift the conversation to exploring the strategic data opportunity that lies between your customers’ aspirational and revealed selves.
Because that’s where a greater future for us all can be discovered.
Somewhere between who we are today and who we aspire to be tomorrow.
Think beyond the obvious
To schedule a call with Futurist Dave Wild to explore our facilitation approach please contact our Business Manager at andrea@dave-wild.com