by In our work as futurists, it is routine to have our forecasts, findings, and recommendations questioned, particularly when they are “early.” I have been teaching that this is normal and to be expected – we shouldn’t be surprised when our work, suggesting a different future(s) with disruptive consequences to our clients is “resisted.” Accepting this doesn’t always make it easier, but hopefully it enables us to move more quickly to the next step of working with that resistance and helping our clients to see it, challenge it, and “open it up.”
I was just reading a marketing pitch for an annual survey of sustainability-related values with several teasers highlighting how the data is now showing, well, what many of us were saying years ago: there is “green” in going green. Really juicy stuff that would have made our life so much easier if we had it 15 or 20 years ago. If we flash back to the initial cases we made, we had to rely on our qualitative tool kits to make the inferences that green and sustainability would one day be mainstream — I remember doing a pitch on sustainability addressing a topic along the lines of “Is Green for Real?” using the CLA framework. I think this one “worked,” because it wasn’t particularly early and there were enough signals/data that it wasn’t really a big leap.
But when it’s really early, and one might argue that this is when we are most useful, many clients asked for “the data,” which was of course anecdotal at the time. It’s not there yet. And this is this space – the opportunity space – where organization can bring their strategic thinking and make some early moves or investments to align with the emerging future. I’m thinking more and more on how to better make our cases without the data – in a world of big data. Or maybe Big Data will help us in this delicate space? Hmmm. Andy Hines
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