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
The MP3 file below captures part two of our chat looking at the Future of Sex. Picking up on the theme of new technology that popped up towards the end of our first discussion in week one, here we move onto haptics and holographics and the extension of that technology from beyond the bedroom and…
Read More >Who’s Been Sleeping In My House? is a new Australian series presented by archaeologist Adam Ford that looks at the stories behind some of our old homes. Adam is the man behind the recent ‘Ned Kelly’ dig among other great archaeology finds here in Australia and the UK. As a futurist I’m always interested in…
Read More >The Association of Professional Futures is holding its first Virtual Gathering, following the sun from Europe, across North America and finishing in the Australia pacific zone. It kicks off tomorrow and links to the program and registration (it’s only $45 for guests for a program featuring some of the worlds most prominent futurists) You…
Read More >I join Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Darwin radio where we continue our discussion about the future of sex. We consider three main areas in this session – smart phone applications; remote relationships and the combination of haptics and holographics as one the emerging means by which we’ll maintain physical contact. You can download the…
Read More >In this chat with Vicki Kerrigan on radio ABC Darwin we discuss the future of sex. This is the first of potentially three conversations where we look at the increasing reach of technology way beyond current online match making sites, the social pressures driving the use of technology as well as the use of technology…
Read More >There’s been a bit of discussion in recent months about a softening housing market around Australia but I wonder how much of it is more indicative of unrealistic expectations on behalf of sellers? In futures work we think in terms of Assumptions and Expectations and aim to test our understanding and so I offer this…
Read More >Unfortunately it looks like my main email address has been hijacked and has been used to send out a series of spam emails. I’d like to apologise to anyone who has received some junk email purporting to come from ‘desiredfutures’ with a series of html links asking you to go and have a look. You…
Read More >Given the amount of plastic swimming in our oceans and rivers and the volume littering our land, the NT Government is aiming to introduce compulsory returns legislation on soft-drink bottles (as happens in South Australia), something that has apparently raised the ire of bottler, Coca Cola. Although they’ve recently backed away from their initial statement…
Read More >Deciphering the hype from reality with regard to drug use can be a challenge for most of us. Professor David Nutt in the UK has given me permission to post a link to the paper he has co-authored with Ruth Weissenborn that looks at the reality of a comparison of harm caused by two common…
Read More >Vicki Kerrigan and I finished off our discussion about the Future of Clothing on ABC Darwin yesterday. We discussed invisibility style cloaks, singlets that monitor your heart rate and stress levels, runners that capture electricity to power your wearable electronics and a few philosophical questions regarding our ability to deal with stress. The file…
Read More >