Aligned and in motion

A description of what we do as futurists that I like: we help clients align with the emerging future (clients can be anyone, not just paid). Get in synch. In the flow. Choose your phrase. Another piece of that occurred to me recently, when I was explaining how we usually do our recommendations in three phases or over three horizons. In that explanation, I was saying how that 1^st phase or horizon gets us in motion.

I think there’s an idea among clients that “we’ll kick in the future-related strategy when the time comes.” Or at the opposite extreme, we go “all in” right from the start.  Neither works. Most innovative future-oriented ideas are at least slightly ahead of their time, if not drastically so. My advice is to be patient … sense the domain, align, and be in motion — doing something, even if very small.

We know that it’s easier to do something when you’re already doing something related – when you’re in motion – than starting from a standstill. I remember as a basketball player being admonished to “keep moving your feet” because it enabled you make the next move faster than it would be from a dead stop. This idea is very much related to the concept of “learning your way into the future.” It’s about small steps, pilots, and experiments. In our version of an elevator speech tool that we use to catalyze thinking about options for action, we have a box on “how do we make it happen” or kickoff.

A good example comes from our own story at Houston Foresight. Peter Bishop the long-time Foresight Program Coordinator started putting courses online, one at a time, in the early 2000s. He took his time. He was aligning with the emerging future. Eventually the whole program was available online as a hybrid with some people still coming to the classroom. As the numbers coming to physical class dropped, we did away with the classroom and went virtual with zoom classes a few years before the pandemic. This is almost 20 years of staying aligned with the emerging future. Did it get us any massive advantage? Not really, but it was helpful. But here it comes, boom, the pandemic, and most of higher ed is scrambling to go virtual overnight. We don’t even blink. That in itself is a nice little “good to be prepared story.” One more thing, though, is we get a huge wave of people inquiring about the program. “Can you do virtual? “You bet — we’re already there.” The end result was we nearly tripled our enrollment in two years. If Peter Bishop hadn’t had the foresight to start aligning with the future and keeping us in motion, we would not have been ready for the greatest growth surge in the history of our program. That to me, is the case for being aligned and in motion. – Andy Hines