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
Every where we look we are being given clear signs of the blatant stupidity and arguably outright criminality of a toxic system of decision making. The Menindee Lakes and Darling River disaster is one example A couple of years ago I was invited to speak at a Private Equity conference at a lovely resort…
Read More >Every year I aim to identify what I think a major focus of the upcoming year will be and in that light I’m declaring 2019 the International Year of the Cooperative. I’m prompted by a multitude of signals that my daily research has uncovered, many of which will be familiar to you – Cost of…
Read More >Here we are with the last posting of the year looking at the potential for wide ranging strategy for a country like the United States. Arguably the United States is undergoing its own version of #Brexit though without the vote of the people. Instead the dictatorial nature of what I see as an incompetent strategic…
Read More >I’m reluctant to make predictions but am getting a few calls so: My tip is on a March 2019 election – the 9th or 16th But that will be an attempt to protect the existing NSW Government hoping that voters will have sufficiently vented. That said though, it also required a Federal Minoroty Government to…
Read More >The Asian Productivity Organisation has shifted gears from being a centre for member countries to talk about productivity, to one that now wants to upskills its member countries. We’ve just completed the first chunk of helping National Productivity secretariats to ready their staff for a more proactive, future facing approach to their Country’s development …
Read More >The question is, ‘how does the thinking inside this document stack up?’ Turns out, pretty good. What we spotted and what problems we said we’d have to watch out for, are just about spot on When it was discovered that the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was going to hold the Australia 2020 Summit,…
Read More >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…
Read More >At a recent session with the Gen Y group working on the ‘Future Melbourne’ project for the City of Melbourne I suggested that the group consider what the result might be if they could ‘invert’ the way the State of Victoria operates. What would you be likely to see if more of the functions of…
Read More >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…
Read More >As the Ipswich Council has determined that recycling schemes are too expensive and indicates it will end collections, the question is ‘what happens next’? If result of the explosion in Tip fees by Councils around Australia is anything to go by, what happens next will not be good China recently decided to end acting…
Read More >