FORGET THE FUTURE

From Nostradamus to Alvin Toffler, individuals and organizations have long been obsessed with trying to see the future. The goal is to somehow get advance warning of “what will be.
” Yet in my experience, industry revolutionaries spend little time gazing deeply into the future. While there are some aspects of the future that are highly probable the cost of bandwidth will go down, our ability to manipulate genes will go up most of what will constitute the future simply can’t be known. Forecasting attempts to predict what will happen. This is largely futile. As Samuel Goldwyn once said, “Only a fool would make predictions especially about the future.” Recognizing this, companies have sought ways of coping with the future’s inherent unpredictability. One response is to rehearse a range of futures via scenarios. Scenario planning speculates on what might happen. The goal is to develop a number of alternate scenarios as a way of sensitizing oneself to the possibility that the future may be quite unlike the present. By focusing in on a few big uncertainties what might happen to the price of oil, how the Green movement might develop, what could happen to global security scenario planning lets a company rehearse a range of possible futures. Scenario planning has many strengths, but it is not, by nature, proactive. Its implicit focus is on how the future may undermine the existing business model. In that sense it tends to be defensive what might that big, bad future do to us rather than offensive how can, we write our will on the future. There is little in scenario planning that suggests a firm can proactively shape its environment, that it can take advantage of changing circumstances right now. At least in practice, it is more often threat-focused than opportunity-focused. It is more about stewardship than entrepreneurship. Companies must do more than rehearse potential futures. After all, the goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you can make happen. Another response to the future’s inherent unpredictability is to become more “agile.” Strategic flexibility is certainly a virtue in uncertain times. The ability to quickly reconfigure products, channels, and skills is essential to maintaining one’s relevance in a world that is shaken, not stirred. But agility is no substitute for a vision of a radically new business model. Agility is great, but if a company is no more than agile, it will be a perpetual follower and in the age of revolution even fast followers find few spoils. Companies fail to create the future not because they fail to predict it but because they fail to imagine it. It is curiosity and creativity they lack, not perspicuity. So it is vitally important that you understand the distinction between “the future” and “the unimagined,” between knowing what’s next and imagining what’s next.