Mastery as a Guiding Philosophy

It’s been a decade now that I’ve been leading the Houston Foresight Program. We’re preparing the next generation of the program’s leadership. This provides a great opportunity to reflect and really focus in on what to carry forward as we consider improving, updating, upgrading, and redesigning.

There are many things about Houston Foresight that “we hold dear.” One for me  is a guiding philosophy of “mastery.” There is so much wrapped up in this. I don’t remember when I first read the amazing little book by George Leonard, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment. As so often happens, we have some ideas swirling around in our head and then boom, someone articulates it in a beautiful way that sounds like they are speaking directly to us.

Some of the gems:

• Mastery is a journey not a destination.
• The modern world – with immediate gratification — can be viewed as a prodigious conspiracy against mastery.
• Mastery includes many learning plateaus (long hours of practice with no apparent gain).
• You reach a decision point of quitting or trying harder or “just having fun” (dropping mastery) …. or staying on the mastery path

I get a lot of questions about “why do I need a degree?” which is another way of saying why should I invest two years of my time and money to learn foresight with you. From Leonard, “There are some skills you can learn on your own, some you can try to learn, but for mastery the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction. The self-taught person is on a chancy path.”

In terms of applying to how we teach foresight, we strongly believe in practice. Each time you do a project, you improve. We support the notion of mastery as a commitment to lifelong practice. It’s not a coincidence that our new strategic plan has lifelong learning as one of our new strategic pillars!

All this said. we are fully aware that not everyone wants to or needs to be a master futurist. We recognize that not all who come to us will want to be master practitioners. We know that some will be better thinkers about the future, some will be hybrids or futurizers, or some will be leaders who have others do the acutal work of foresight. But if you come to the master’s program, and you want to do be a master practitioner, we believe that you are in the right place! For those who believe that foresight is their life’s work … we want you!

 I am now 100% thoroughly convinced that foresight works when done properly. It is difficult to persuade people to do it properly, but when you do, oh my, what a beautiful thing. – Andy Hines