Getting Your Future Right

Getting Your Future Right fills a huge gap in personal development! For perhaps the first time for many of us, using this book provides a way for any person to think about, develop, plan for, and then execute a Personal Life plan for a better life!

This is a skill we are never taught at school. It’s a skill that is rarely developed in our careers. Instead for some, the lucky few, the ‘school of life’ is the best chance they have to develop the kind of insight into making their life a success. For the rest of us, life happens by accident.

Up until now, for most of us, we just have not had a way to think about what we want for our life. For most of us, knowing what questions to ask, knowing what issues are important; and knowing how to get started is just not something that is natural.

And that is why this book has been written. It is part guide book and part workbook. It is written to assist you in Getting Your Future Right

The Quick Overview for People in a Hurry: how the book works

You will set a Vision of preferred destination for your life. If you’re not too sure what your Vision is, this book will help you consider and then write a Vision that appeals greatly to you.

You will identify the main challenges in your life. They will be those challenges that, were you to resolve them, will move you closer to your desired Vision. I call these main challenges ‘Strategic Issues’.

You’ll need to work out what skills and resources you have available to you right now. You’ll be asked to also identify which skills you will need to have available, in order to address the challenges (Strategic Issues) you’ve identified. I call these skills ‘Capabilities’

Then, having identified the Capabilities you will need and have, you work out how you will use those resources. I call this step ‘Strategic Action’ and having followed the process what you will have is:

  • A set of Actions
  • Using your available Capabilities
  • That will handle your Strategic Issues
  • That then moves you closer to your desired future, your Vision!

Very straight forward, yet very few people actually do it! The rest of the book shows you how to monitor your progress and to keep evolving and improving. But be warned – you will have to take action, to think and to apply some effort. This is no wish list. You will think, plan, then act and I’ll show you how to put this together. Best of luck!

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The model used in this book has been adapted from the model I designed for The Australian Strategic Planning Institute (TASPI) after participants in our public workshops asked me whether the appproach would work for personal planning. I responded at the time that, in the absence of any other approach, it was likely the model would be quite useful.

The feedback has been incredibly positive. The model works and works very well. But be warned! This is no quick fix book. For many people, this will be the first time they have taken the chance to think seriously about what they would like their life to be like. There is no ‘secret’ to a successful life where a simple ‘thought’ will make it all happen. In this book you’ll discover that the thought is just one part – you then need to know where to act and why. That’s what this book will help you sort out. I wish you much success!

When was the last time you sat down and really thought about the type of life you would like to create? When have you thought about what your skills were and how you would use them? How often have you felt that your life was going no-where and you weren’t sure how to make a change for the better? Through this book I’ll guide you with stories of my own up and down journey and then get you to apply what you know to making a clearer choice about where you want to be in the future.

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You are probably much, much closer to having the future you’d prefer, than you realise. For most of us (and I was one of them) we have never been taught how to put some form and structure to our approach to life. Instead we’ve just kind of stumbled along, often on ‘auto-pilot’ without even knowing where we were headed or why we were doing what we were doing.

This book is the wake up call for your life. You deserve to make your life better than what it is now. This book will help you do that

BBC Article on the Future of work and the likely skills needed

Oct 14, 2018

it’s OK not to know your career path when you leave university – sometimes that won’t emerge until much later down the track,” Barber says. “We should remind kids that the pathway they select to start off with is unlikely to be their final pathway,   Was interviewed by #TheodoraSutcliffe who wrote this article for…

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May 19, 2018

McKinsey’s interview with Richard Thaler on ‘debiasing the corporation’ is a really good one. I’ve spent the best part of two decades trying to help organisations unpack their biases through the use of foresight. I recommend this article to you   Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler offers some great insights as to how to make more…

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Disaster Ahead for the People of Ipswich

Apr 22, 2018

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Mar 8, 2018

As Nations look to develop their understanding of Productivity and more effective planning, National Productivity Councils are often the first point of call for Governments looking for ideas. The Asia Productivity Organisation has been running since 1961 helping its member countries develop more effective approaches. I’ve just spent a week in Tokyo helping a group…

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Saving the Polar Ice Caps

Aug 16, 2017

Okay I admit that on the first take this idea might sound a little crazy. I reminded myself however of that saying that ‘all great ideas must at first sound crazy to the existing paradigm…’ or some such thing. You might know who said it (please send me an email if you do). So I…

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To Manage Your Expectations, First You Need to Know What They Are

Jan 27, 2017

We all use words that tell us about the results that were achieved and whether our expectations were met, missed or exceeded. Surprised? Disappointed? Delighted? The only way you can experience these emotions and others like them, is to have an expectation in mind. And the ONLY way you can teach your organisation to learn…

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There’s No such Thing as a Normal Future

Dec 8, 2016

The last couple of months have been hectic to say the least, with a myriad of client engagements across an array of industry sectors. And as you can see from the list below one thing is clear: EVERYONE wants to understand what is shaping their future and how they might be able to influence that…

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I’m nominating 2016 as The International Year for Consumer Fightback

Nov 19, 2016

Those of you that have been tracking this website for a while will know that towards the end of each year, I nominate the following year’s area of focus. For instance I declared that 2015 would be the International Year of Battery Technology, and as the news stories, product research and renewables push shows, it…

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Planning Tips for Local Government Agencies

Sep 21, 2016

I’ll be helping to kick off the Local Government Corporate Planners Conference in a couple of weeks, offering some thoughts about emerging issues for Councils and an approach to planning that should alleviate some issues for them. You can find details in   this link to the conference program which is being held at Citadines…

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