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
A quick note for the history buffs among us – in this month of August fifty years ago, the first components of the Berlin Wall were constructed with rings of barbed wire severing Berlin into visually distinct west and east Berlin. Russia’s main challenge at that time was the 10,000 or so East Germans each…
Read More >Let me start by saying that my Masters of Science qualification is NOT held in economics and with that said I’m holding an interested person’s perspective toward wanting to know ‘why’ and ‘how’. I have some questions and thoughts about the theory of Supply and Demand and would be happy to have some feedback from…
Read More >Below you’ll find this afternoon’s discussion with ABC Darwin radio in which host Vicki Kerrigan chats with futurist Marcus Barber about the emerging research into lab grown meat as a potential addition to or replacement of, existing livestock farming methods. The program streamed live on 105.7 ABC Darwin this afternoon, discussing the University of…
Read More >Continuing the futures discussions on ABC Darwin Radio, this time with Paul Dale who is filling in for Vicki Kerrigan whilst Vicki is handling the breakfast time slot, we discuss some of the conference sessions at the World Futures Conference here in Vancouver You can listen to the audio stream here and cue this…
Read More >My slides from today’s presentation on ‘Getting You Future Right’ can be found at the link below To those at the session, my apologies for the technical challenges and hope these slides can provide more context for you – contact me if you have any questions. Access the Slides Here
Read More >Here’s the upload of my conversation with Vicki Kerrigan at ABC Radio Darwin. In it I offer the first three of ten steps designed to help you get your future right. In last week’s session I left Vicki with a question to ponder: Is my life headed where I want it to go, and if…
Read More >Futurist Marcus Barber will be joining ABC’s Vicki Kerrigan in Darwin for the first of an ongoing discussion about the future this Wednesday. Each week on Wednesday afternoon’s, Vicki and Marcus will discuss the future of something, how we prepare for the future, what the future looks like for some industries and other related futures…
Read More >The panel session at the National Manufacturing Week 2011 went well though with four of us on the panel, time was quite compressed. Some really good thoughts from Phillip Chindamo from AIG, Damon Cantwell from Deloitte and Erol Harvey from Minifab, delightfully chaired by Sandra George from SEBN at the City of Greater Dandenong. Rather…
Read More >On Thursday I’ll be part of the panel that wraps up the National Manufacturing Week 2011 in Melbourne at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre under the theme of Meeting the challenges of the next generation of manufacturing with a focus on Innovation and Sustainability. It should be an interesting chat as we consider what…
Read More >There’s lots to like about borrowing ideas from other areas especially where those ideas can lead to a significant positive shift. In the link below, Zaid Ali Alsagoff an educational blogging specialist highlights why the Finnish Education system stands as a potential model to embrace. And whilst there are examples of this type of thinking…
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