Let’s talk about success

I was happy to see my paper “Let’s Talk about Success: A Proposed Foresight Outcomes Framework for Organizational Futurists” win an APF Most Significant Futures Work Award back in July. And to be honest, a little surprised. Success in our work does not come up a lot when we talk among ourselves. We talk about the project, but not so much on whether they were judged successful. – not only bout the client but even how we viewed them. Granted, because of the timeframes we work with, it is challenging to specify or measure. So, it’s good that this topic is being recognized. Indeed, a few years back my colleague Terry Grim won an MSFW Award for the Foresight Maturity Model that measures levels of maturity in key foresight practices. The APF Professionalization Task Force identified developing professional standards as part of its second phase of work. Finally, the Houston Foresight program had “Good Futures Work” as the theme of its most recent Spring Gathering.

My old boss Joe Coates had suggested that the marketplace will tell you if you are doing good work. If you’re not, clients and repeat business will eventually go away. Typically, the practitioners in an emerging field are too busy doing the work to spend much time reflecting on it compared to established fields. They have a network of well-established university programs to do this kind of research for them. Foresight has maybe a half-dozen or so graduate programs in the entire world! And our Houston Program is a Master’s program that is aimed at producing professional futurists, not doing the deep academic research typical of PhD programs.

It makes that we are where we are. Great, now what? In a wide-open field like ours, we can practically choose the area we want to lead in. I have particularly intrigued with the integration of foresight into organizations and the role of organizational futurists. I came at the question from my own experience as an organizational futurist for The Kellogg Company and the Dow Chemical Company, and from the perspective of a consulting and academic futurist helping futurists and organizations to start an organizational foresight function – whether companies, government agencies, NGOs, non-profits, etc. Thus, my contribution to the success question started there.

I think we have to start with being clear on what we think we can deliver. And then having conversations with our clients about it. To put it bluntly, we need to start having better conversations about outcomes and success. Indeed the Foresight Outcomes Framework that I propose is quite simple and is primarily designed as a discussion starter with stakeholders and the boss. It can help to set expectations more appropriately.

This framework is based upon a key assumption that the goal of the organizational futurist is to influence the decision-making process. What it’s really trying to do is help our organizations make more informed decisions about the future. It draws on the view of Pierre Wack that scenario work is ultimately aimed at influencing the mental model of decision-makers. He suggested that effective scenarios “change the decision-makers’ assumptions about how the world works and compel them to reorganize their mental framework of reality.” In simple terms, we deliver “better decisions about the future.”

If you want more, I explored this question as part of my dissertation research a few years back from the perspective of the organizational futurist, that is, a futurist working internally for a single organization. There are gory details in my dissertation. – Andy Hines