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
From an organisational perspective it is pretty common for senior managers to spend significant energy considering when to upgrade plant and equipment, be it machinery, vehicles or IT infrastructure. The upgrades can occur on the run (in response to a surge in demand for instance), as a result of necessity (say as a result of…
Read More >If you’ve seen me speak before you already know I take a provocative stance when it comes to areas like personnel development, training and recruitment. Clients also know that once we’ve opened the door to thinking differently, they’re guided through some significant ‘of course’ moments in terms of how they approach developing their people and…
Read More >I flag from the outset that I haven’t been a regular readers of newspapers for almost a decade, only slightly less than my giving up on mainstream TV News shows. As such you should take this with a grain of salt, coming as it does from someone who reads maybe a paper a week and…
Read More >In the search for fuels and energy sources that act as a replacement to Oil, there’s much hype and claims that need to be tested. In much the same as claims about carbon capture technology being built onto existing coal fired power stations seem to lack both viability and credibility (in my view), the same…
Read More >Every day people in positions of ‘opinion authority’ make choices about what ‘opinions’ they will offer on a whole array of subjects. And it would be fair to say that over the past five years or so, many of those ‘opinion authorities’ have been significantly negative on Australia’s manufacturing sector. There’s no doubt that the…
Read More >As a futurist spending much of my time assessing emerging developments and their implications across an array of industry sectors, I am frequently asked for a view on ‘consumer trends’. Common questions are ‘what will consumers want in the future?’ ‘Does our product (service) have a place?’ ‘What is driving consumer behaviour?’ ‘How can we…
Read More >The Trucking Industry, as a key part of the wider Supply Chain and Logistics Industry is coming to the end of an era, right at the time when it should be being refreshed. Put simply, there just aren’t enough drivers for trucks, and to date, attempts to recruit more drivers have been less that what…
Read More >In case you haven’t had time to keep up with these events, here’s a quick overview of the Everyday Sexism project’s attempts to hold FaceBook to account for its explicit support of sexual violence against women as portrayed in the many permitted Facebook pages that promote rape, rape culture, and violence against women. Facebook appears…
Read More >Today I have a bee in my bonnet, so please look away if my frankness might bother you. In the last couple of days I’ve had yet another conversation with a Local Council planning team manager about Strategic Planning for their Council that bothered me a great deal. What really has me bothered is that…
Read More >Whilst many people have heard about Drones in terms of their military applications, the concept of micro drones and their use in civilian settings is not quite so well known. It appears that the surveillance capability that technologies like Drones provide, are edging their way into more social environments. That may or may not be…
Read More >