Organizations erroneously believe that 100% of the value of strategic planning for the future lies in determining “what comes next” or putting a stake in the ground regarding “where we want to be.”
Most of the real value associated with strategic planning for the future emerges from a nondelusional articulation of the current situation. Just like with Uber or Google Maps, if you want to get where you are going, you have to be very specific about where you are starting from.
Futurists and strategic planners need to stop obsessing about technology end-points and become adept at the twin interrelated skills of situation analysis and world building. Situation analysis involves diagnostically fleshing out the psycho-social-economic reality of the present — how we think, how we live, how we interact, how we work. World-building, on the other hand, involves imaginatively architecting a depiction, at an MRI-level of detail, of future us. What will our Umwelt — a term coined by zoologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll in 1909 to describe the sensory bubble that surrounds an animal; its perceptual world — be?
The most important questions about the future are who will we be and when will we be.
Who IT wants to be
Historically our CIO ancestors wanted to be funded. For twenty years, from approximately 1980 to 2000, the primary objective of IT strategy was to solicit funding. Organizations were reluctant to spend money on technology.
“That’s not the problem today,” says Bruce Rogow, former vice president and global head of research for Gartner and a Gartner executive fellow for 26 years.
There was an interregnum when IT was very focused on proving that we were not wasting money. In 2015, Dr. Vince Kellen, then senior vice provost and CIO at University of Kentucky and now CIO for the University of California, San Diego, summarized the IT strategic planning environment during the decade 2010-2020 as attempting to prevent “over-investment in that which doesn’t work.”
Paraphrasing political pollster James Carville, “It’s not the technology, stupid.” Daniel Barchi, former Navy ship-driver and currently senior EVP and CIO of CommonSpirit Health, explains one of the truisms of CIO value creation. Your time should be allocated as follows:
- 80% to people
- 15% to process
- 5% to technology
In many cases, the time allocation is exactly reversed. We are spending way too much time perseverating on “Tech Two-Point-0s” and not enough time on “Employee/Manager Two-Point-0s.”
We will always be in the Early Days of Something. The body of knowledge associated with how new technology enters the organization and economy has matured (see Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm). It’s time to focus on the human side of the future.
I recently told an audience of around 350 analytic professionals that their future was a function of how they think (mental models) and what they did (their actions). In doing so I posited that they had agency — that they had some say in how their lives and careers progressed.
The question of when-will-we-be?
The reason our species sits at the top of the food chain is because we have the ability to imagine and prepare for the future. Psychologist Martin Seligman writes that “a more apt name for our species would be homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects.”
When you think about Future Youand Future Uswhat does “T” equal — that is, how far in the future are you looking? Gloria Mark, professor in the computer science department at University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span,tells us that 20 years ago our attention span was two and a half minutes. In 2024 empirical evidence indicates the modern attention span has shrunk to around 45 seconds.
If 45 seconds is the new now, when is the new next? My good friend Geoffrey Moore told me over breakfast at Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside, Calif., that “every five years in the technology sector … things change enough to force me to write another book.”
Tomas Soderstrom, former CTO of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and now a global enterprise strategist at AWS, told me, “An IT decade only lasts three years.” This is what many anthropologists now consider a “generation” (it used to be about 30 years).
Talking to mid-career knowledge workers, it appears that 30 months (2.5 years) is becoming the optimal temporal “chunk” inside which to do career and strategic planning.
Every 30 months an individual and an enterprise should experience:
- A step change in capability
- A step change in status (i.e., how much value people accord you)
- An exponential increase in delivered and recognized benefit
Put that stake in the ground. Start the clock and begin your 30-month path to a better you.
Read More from This Article: Strategic planning: How CIOs can build the best possible future
Source: News