In 2019, Innosight conducted a survey of senior executives across a wide variety of industries around the world. Fully 75 percent of them reported that their companies never plan or forecast beyond the next five years. Only 10 percent set their planning horizons at ten years or more. Even so, an overwhelming majority declared themselves confident that they could transform their companies in response to disruptive threats.
But how could they? Though you might not see signs of trouble for the next five years, year six or seven could bring you an unwelcome surprise—or hand you an opportunity that your organization will not be prepared to take advantage of. Transformations take time to plan, program, and execute. Think of Nokia when it began losing market share to Apple’s iPhone and the plethora of smart phones powered by the Android operating system. By the time CEO Stephen Elop hit “send” on his famous “burning platform” memo, announcing the bold steps Nokia was prepared to take, it was too late.
When business leaders set aside the time and the bandwidth to envision the future in a disciplined, rigorous way, they almost always see how business-as-usual can become a recipe for irrelevance. In 2010, for example, a leading defense company undertook a strategic planning initiative in which its leaders projected their business prospects out to 2020. The results were reassuring; their pipeline of contracts for aircraft and security systems would sustain revenue growth at exactly the rate they aspired to. But when they repeated the exercise, this time looking out to 2030, when many of their current contracts are scheduled to expire and geopolitical forces and technological trends would have likely combined to create a new set of customer needs, they realized that they were facing a significant growth gap.
In 2016, the leaders of a major automotive company looked out to 2030 and saw a world in which fully-electric vehicles were rapidly growing their market share while the internal combustion engine was being banned in major global markets; where ride sharing was eclipsing car ownership in urban centers, and autonomous vehicles were playing a growing role. None of these developments were science fiction—the trends were already visible in various corners of the market.
Business literature tends to mythologize visionaries as unique cases that can only be admired, not emulated. But every leader should aspire to become a practical visionary, which is to say, someone who has developed a view of his or her organization’s future that is tangible enough to be linked to an explicit strategic path. The ability to develop such a vision and then operationalize can be taught and learned; moreover, it can be driven into the cultures of even the most hidebound organizations, reigniting their entrepreneurial fires and infusing them with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.
Key to this is an approach we call “future-back,” which we explore in our recent book, “Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth.” We’ll provide an overview of future-back, which is both a way of thinking and a set of processes, in this briefing.
The Future-back Process
When company leaders convene as a team, their agendas mostly turn on routine oversight and governance; their purview is the immediate present and the relatively short-term. That is as it should be, when the job at hand is routine. But when markets shift, consumer preferences change, and new technologies emerge, leaders who solely think from the present forward are often caught unaware, busily working to solve today’s problems but unprepared for the even bigger ones that are on the horizon. That is where future-back thinking and processes come in. When the objective is to go beyond your organization’s established ways of doing things, future-back’s iterative and non-linear approach better enables you to:
- Reinvent a core business or flailing function
- Develop a disruptive, beyond-the-core product
- Create and launch a breakthrough marketing strategy
- Conceive a bold new vision for your enterprise as a whole
Present-forward thinking increments off of existing paradigms, processes, and data streams. Future-back thinking starts with a clean sheet; it is concerned with what could be rather than what is.
It starts when you and your team undertake an effort to actively, intensively, and imaginatively immerse yourself in your organization’s likely future environment so you can determine what you must do to thrive in it. Then, you walk that vision back to the present in the form of concrete initiatives.