Strategic Agility and the Art of Paying Attention
he many people who’ve been through one of The Australian Strategic Planning Institute’s workshops over the past six years, will know how much emphasis is placed on the need to pay attention to things going on around you. In particular as part of the idea of tracking your progress toward your desired future (your Vision). So it’s great to see some others starting to emphasise the need for agility in your personal or organisational setting
The challenge however is, ‘how’. Saying you need to be agile and knowing how to do it are two very different things, and one recent article on agility reads more like an advertisement for consulting services.
So here’s how I recommend you do it: With every strategic action you are planning to undertake (which moves you closer to your desired future), you ought to be able to list (once you’ve thought deliberately about it) a series of signs or indicators that would tell you that your action is working in your favour. Equally important, but significantly less pursued, is a counter list of signals that would indicate your actions is NOT getting you to where you want to go. Paying attention is a shared responsibility and can be developed.
If you only pay attention to or look out for positive signals, you’ll miss opportunities to take remedial action. If you only pay attention to negative signals, you never take action. Either way, it impacts on your agility. So pay attention to both. More details on the ‘How To’ part of staying agile, can be found in my book Getting Your Future Right which you’ll find here
Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will be kicking off proceedings at the 2008 Regional Produce Summit in Wangaratta on the 20th of October where he’ll detail some of the emerging issues likely to impact upon the tourism and food sector in the foreseeable future and suggest ways that businesses in the sector might be able to…
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Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber has contributed a chapter to Volume Five of the ‘Death and Anti-Death’ Anthology which has just been published by Ria University. With contributors including Aubrey de Grey and Kevin Kelly and edited by Dr. Charles Tandy, Volume Five in the series is dedicated to the memory of Loren Eiseley, the renowned…
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Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber was well and truly forced to justify the existence of his profession when venturing along to Jon Faine’s Conversation Hour last week. Co-hosted by Cath Pope the discussion looked at the role of Futurists, the Australia 2020 Futurists Summit and Jon’s scepticism around the role of futurists.. Along with Janoel Liddy,…
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