Your Future Requires Planning – and so does ours!
Members of the Futures Foundation and the AFFA will be congregating in Pearl Beach in the coming weeks to consider the state of play in the Australian Futures community. Given the emerging challenges in Australia and around the world, the futures community requires just as much serious contemplation and forethought as does any one
The challenge for many businesses is that they do most of their ‘planning’ activities BEFORE most of their thinking activities. I remember a senior manager of one large entity coming to me two days before an updated strategic plan was due to be submitted to the board with the following request: ‘The Organisation’s new strategic plan is due on Thursday – can you put something together that we can put it to the board?’ And this from an organisation employing quite a few thousand people! At the time I said ‘No I can’t but if you bring me last year’s plan I’ll look at it and tell you areas where it needs to be improved in terms of clarity and content’ which is what this senior manager did.
There was NO thinking done by this senior manager prior to planning or the other senior managers involved in making decisions. In fact what it indicated was that the organisation had little intention of taking action on any of the initiatives contained within the Strategic Plan. One doesn’t need to be Einstein to work out how often that organisation’s senior management digs its employees into trouble!
Such a knee jerk approach occurs because senior management fails to allocate time to thinking seriously about the emerging future and potential implications. The ‘last minute’ orientation occurs because in the past, senior managers have used a planning process that ignores accountability to ther decisions made and the intended and desired outcomes they set. Such a process occurs all too often because the Board do not question the Strategic Planning process as part of a futures thinking cycle.
For the futures community we hold ourselves to arguably higher standards of thinking and planning which is why the Futures Foundation Board, along with members from both FF and the AFFA groups have been encouraged to attend the planning weekend. Sure the surroundings will be conducive to a pleasant few days, and I suspect that given the depth of thinking about to be undertaken, much of the surroundings will take a distant second place.
If you’re interested in ways to improve your organisation’s planning methods and future based thinking skills, feel free and contact me
Or so it may seem. This quarter has seen me interstate facilitating some strategic planning workshops; overseas working with an established Government client, working with CGD, SELLEN, and Hilton Manufacturing among others here in Oz, a couple of weeks holiday down in Tasmania, and also the occasional radio interview looking at the ‘Future of…’. And…
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Read More >Tomorrow morning (Friday the 12th) I’ll be joining Elizabeth Kulas on Disrupt Radio discussing the Future Of Workplaces. There’ll be a particular focus on why most organisations choose to struggle because they rely on outdated models of employee management. A 7.15am kick-off where, in about 7 minutes or so, I’ll try to distill 20 years…
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Read More >An interesting public workshop in Perth in the first week of October introducing a varied group to the Organisational Evolution model. The Org-Ev is the model I developed for the start up of The Australian Strategic Planning Institute in conjunction with Steven Bowman. Given the diversity of the group, there were a number of surprises…
Read More >A note for those of you in Perth that there are just 4 spaces left for the Introduction to the Organisational Evolution Model workshop at Adina Apartments in Perth. The Org Ev model has been designed to enhance Strategic Planning and decision making and this introductory workshop is aimed at those looking to attend the…
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