Thursday, October 16, 2008

The Future, Backwards

Yesterday I ran my second Future, Backwards  in my role as an internal consultant. The day was focussed on developing a plan of action in a changing environment.

The day was scheduled to conduct two simultaneous 'Future, Backwards' then to take the Turning Points from both as Sensemaking Items for use in the Cynefin Model Creation by Social Construction (corners method). The result was to role directly into a Domain-based Strategy Planning Session. There is nothing overly exciting about this as a methodology but it was my first attempt.

It is probably timely to recognise that I was assisted by team members that are not accredited practitioners, which had some impact but was not really the biggest learning point. There were a number, particularly the cognitive load that it places on the participants needs to be managed and exposing the executive to so much ambiguity does not necessarily lead to great results. 

The real take away for me was finding myself frustrated at the lack of imagination and extremely limited vision in the description of possible future states. On thinking about this I wonder if the issue is a 'dominant organisational narrative' in the form of a mantra. Namely, 'more people', 'more money' and  'more resources'...

I am particularly interested to know if anyone has come across a similar issue in their organisation or am I dealing with something peculiar

No comments: