Accelerating into the future

Your business’s future isn’t entirely off in the distance. It’s actually all around you – you’re just not seeing it. Dave Wild helps you and your team to become ‘Futuready’.

Have you ever driven in rain so heavy you knew you really shouldn’t be driving?

Remember how it felt? Barely able to see what’s in front of you, every sense heightened, tensed for a possible collision.

The critical question is – did your lack of vision cause you to travel faster or slower?

I’m guessing you slowed down. Significantly.

Which is exactly what happens when your vision and plans for the future of your business remain unclear. Causing doubt and uncertainty for those traveling alongside you.

It doesn’t have to be like this. You can remove this uncertainty and accelerate forward by lifting your leadership approach and team culture to becoming ‘Futuready’, instead of being… 

Resistant

We’ve all met them. Even been one of them at times. People who resist change. Resist the future. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the world is changing all around them, they cling to the past; determined to stop (or at least slow down) progress. Holding back the business. Holding back ‘the future you’.

Why do we insist on doing this? At a surface level it’s easy to say people don’t like change. However it’s not as simplistic as this – as in many aspects of life we most certainly do like change. 

At a neuroscience level our brains are wired to identify and repeat familiar patterns. Just as it’s far easier and safer to travel on an established road than it is to go off-roading, it’s easier for our thoughts to travel from neuron to neuron across well-worn synaptic  connections.

So to accelerate forward, inspire the resistant with new possibilities for the future, rather than just sitting back and waiting for change to over-take them, causing your business to be… 

Reactive

The thing about the future is it’s always arriving. And never arriving. It’s impossible to resist the future forever because it’s constantly turning into the present.

That doesn’t mean we can’t prepare for it. However, the majority of people don’t. They wait until change is inevitable and then react when they have to. Which is fine when the shift is an easy one to make. However, in business often the changes are challenging, requiring considerable time and effort to develop new skills and processes.

Take, for example, email. Which was invented first: email or the lava lamp? Both originated around the same time in the 60s – more than half a century ago. However, while you won’t find too many lava lamps on office desks, you will still find most people busy sending emails.

Meanwhile, the next generation of workers have already started shifting their communication onto new collaboration platforms for more efficient and connected communications. Just as our personal communication long ago evolved to social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, our workplace communications are slowly but surely shifting onto collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Workplace by Facebook.

So instead of being forced to react when others stop replying to your emails (just as they stopped replying to faxes, carrier pigeons and stone tablets) look more closely at the future arriving all around you. Take time out to be…

Reflective

Strategic planning is a critical aspect of any successful business. Whether it’s a formal annual planning process or conversations about the future, successfully achieving goals depends on making the shift from reacting to reflecting – examining past performance in order to determine where best to refocus energy for greater outcomes.

This reflective mode of operating works well in slow-moving environments with relatively predictable outcomes. It’s how we arrived at conventional leadership structures where experienced board members guide the next generation of leaders by reflecting their past learnings.

However, as the rate of change accelerated, traditional strategic planning cycles could no longer keep up – shifting from annual planning cycles to quarterly and then even shorter, in order to become more…

Responsive

Agile. Collaborative. Diverse. Inclusive. If you look at the critical shifts happening within modern workplaces, they’re all designed to enable organisations to become more responsive.

To better understand, anticipate and adapt to the changing needs of their customers and team. Although these shifts might seem to be relatively recent, they’ve been going on for a very long time. 

For example, the Agile Manifesto which defined new ways of working was first written in 2001. At the time it was…

Revolutionary

As much as people in business love to talk about the idea of disruption – the reality is most people don’t like to disrupt. And they like being disrupted even less.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at your next meeting. Where do people sit? Do they sit around the table where the chairs are placed – even sitting in the exact same chair? Or do they randomly – disruptively – move the chairs around into totally new locations in the room?

Or, literally going a step further, do they take their chairs out of the room to meet in a totally different space, while also collaborating with more diverse people than the ‘echo chamber’ often found in the room?

This disruptive shift is exactly what’s slowly happening over time to entire industries. Except that at first the existing structures are reorganised without anyone paying much attention. Because disruption doesn’t happen all at once with a big bang. It begins quietly on the edges with a few revolutionaries.

So how do you make this shift – from the relative safety of responding to the known, crossing the revolutionary dangers of the unknown, to become…

Futuready

Your future isn’t entirely off in the distance. It’s actually all around you – you’re just not seeing it.

Just like searching for road markings through the rain, gain greater vision by looking more closely at faint signals in the environment around you; looking for subtle shifts indicating what lies ahead – enabling you and your business to accelerate into the future with greater confidence.

For example, have you noticed the increasing number of people walking around with wireless earbuds? Did you vaguely think it was just a modern way to listen to music… or did you pause to more deeply consider the unfolding impact of conversational interfaces combined with artificially intelligent assistants? Following commands. Providing direction. Slowly shifting us from glowing screens to the new world of invisible interfaces.

So don’t wait for the future of your business to become entirely clear. As the risk is: perfect clarity only occurs at the point of… impact.

Instead, focus with greater clarity on the signals of your future all around you.

Then accelerate forward.