Why scenario thinking (more than scenario planning) is critical for executives today

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I recently gave a presentation to the executive team of a major mining services company at their annual strategy offsite. As has been a frequent style of engagement for me this year, my role was to stimulate broader, longer-term thinking by talking about the future of business.

While I have been doing a range of scenario planning work recently, in this case I simply wanted to impress on the executives the importance of scenario thinking. I showed the following three slides to support my discussion of the issues.

Scenariosmostuseful.jpg

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Five keys to helping executive teams think about the future

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My single biggest client-facing activity this year has been speaking to executive teams about the future of business. These presentations are usually scheduled during strategy offsites or retreats, though sometimes are embedded into leadership development programs or a scheduled presentation within an ongoing transformation program. Sometimes I run a full-day workshop, more often I have 45-90 minutes to work with.

The intent of inviting me is largely to stimulate executives to think beyond the everyday, get new ideas, and develop an optimistic mindset about the challenges and opportunities afforded by the extraordinary pace of change today. Many have latched onto the title of one of my presentation topics, Embracing the Future, as the attitude they wish to engender.

There is only so much you can achieve in a brief presentation. However I have to work with what I am given, do the best with that, and do what I can for the session to result in lasting energy and initiatives. Here are some of the approaches I find effective.

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New flyer on keynote speaking work

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We recently updated our flyer on my keynote speaking work, highlighting that I am speaking primarily as a futurist these days, adding in a few extra cities I’ve spoken in since the last edition, and a few other tweaks.

The flyer is embedded below, you can download it here, or let us know if you’d like print copies. Head over to my speaker website for more detailed speaking topics. :-)

Ross Dawson: Keynote Speaker | Futurist | Strategy Advisor

Keynote at Critical Horizons regional futures conference: the potential of a connected world

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Today I spoke at the Critical Horizons Regional Futures conference held in Bunbury, Western Australia,which “examines emerging global trends and how they might affect regional communities in the South West Region of Western Australia”. It is fantastic that a non-urban region runs a regular event to examine its future. It is clear that the attendees from across business and government had a keen appetite to explore the future and what they need to do to create a prosperous region in years to come.

The regional economy is still largely driven by mining and to a lesser extent agriculture (including the delightful Margaret River wines). It is experiencing many issues common to regional areas, including the loss of younger people to cities. However it has a particular context in its location. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and Perth is the most isolated city in the world. Bunbury is over 2 hours drive away from Perth. It took me 10 hours door-to-door to get here from Sydney – by far the longest it has taken me to get to a speaking gig in Australia.

The region’s geographic isolation means the topic of my keynote here, Power to the People: Thriving in a Hyperconnected Society, is immensely relevant. I discussed the overwhelming trend of how a connected world is shifting power from institutions to individuals. However I also covered the implications for regions of the emerging global talent economy. Crowdsourcing tools on one level provide access to extraordinary talent that can be harnessed in ways limited only by imagination. Yet a connected world also provides opportunities to provide services, both in existing domains, and especially in managing projects.

To the extent that they are useful (usual disclaimer: my slides are created to accompany my speeches, not to be viewed on their own) here are my slides for my keynote (minus the Flash animations).

Power to the People! | Critical Horizons conference | Ross Dawson Keynote speaker slides

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The Economist on online freelancing and the future of work: crowdsourcing goes mainstream

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The Economist this week addresses the wonderful world of online freelancing and crowdsourcing, under the rubrik Work in the digital age. The full article is well worth a read.

The article points to the potential for online freelancing and piecework to account for a substantial part of global labor. While The Economist has touched on the issue before, this is now something that is a significant business issue which is going to start attracting a lot more coverage. The Economist notes:

Millions of workers are embracing freelancing as an alternative to full-time employment or because they cannot find salaried jobs. According to IDC, a market-research firm, there were around 12m full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in America alone at the end of last year and there will be 14m by 2015. Experts reckon this number will keep rising for several reasons, including a sluggish jobs market and workers’ growing desire for the flexibility to be able to look after parents or children.

Technology is also driving the trend. Over the past few years a host of fast-growing firms such as Elance, oDesk and LiveOps have begun to take advantage of “the cloud”—tech-speak for the combination of ubiquitous fast internet connections and cheap, plentiful web-based computing power—to deliver sophisticated software that makes it easier to monitor and manage remote workers.

One of the key issues is that work on these sites is no longer limited to graphic design and web development – larger, more sophisticated, more complex, and better-paid work is shifting on to these sites.

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Will there be capital markets for equity in people?

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I recently read the entertaining science fiction novel The Unincorporated Man by brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin. The premise is that several hundred years in the future everyone is incorporated at birth, with the government owning 5% and parents 20%. People trade equity in themselves for their education and development, then spend their life trying to earn back majority ownership so they can control their lives. Into this world an entrepreneur of today who underwent cryogenic freezing is revived, and refuses to cede ownership of himself.

This is not a new idea. In 1995 aspiring British actress Caroline Ilana, trying to fund her attendance at acting school, established a corporation with herself as the sole asset, giving shareholders 10% of her earnings. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Ben Elton, Julie Christie and many other celebrities she approached bought shares.

In their 1998 book Blur, Stan Davis and Chris Meyer wrote about the blurring line between being a laborer and a capitalist, resulting in the securitization of individuals.

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There are TWO possible attitudes companies can have to social media

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Last week I gave a presentation on the future of business to the top executive team of a large fast-moving consumer goods company at their quarterly offsite meeting.

One of the issues they were keen to hear about is the rise of social media and how they should respond.

I told them that there are essentially two possible attitudes a company can have to engaging with its customers in an open world.

One attitude is to EMBRACE the fact that customers now have a voice that the company – and others – can hear, and to do whatever possible to help its advocates to form communities and talk about its products. That doesn’t mean its executives aren’t concerned that things can go wrong in social media. But the belief is that fundamentally it is a GOOD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.

The other attitude is to HATE the fact that customers have a voice that can be widely heard. While the executives realize that their fans can communicate their love for their products, they are far more afraid that bad things will be said about them, merited or not, and they think they will have no recourse. The belief is that it is fundamentally a BAD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.

I used one example for each of these attitudes.

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California Management Review: Network perspectives on improving team performance in sales, innovation, and execution

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The summer issue of California Management Review a couple of years ago contains an article co-authored by myself together with Rob Cross of the University of Virginia, Kate Ehrlich of IBM, and John Helferich of Northeastern University, titled Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective. The article can be purchased from the California Management Review website (the journal is published by the Haas School of Business at University of California – Berkeley).

I’ve provided the synopsis of the paper and a more detailed description below. Writing the paper was an interesting process, bringing together specific domain expertise and insights from projects that each of the four of us have run over the last few years. The result is a framework and detailed prescriptions on how a network perspective can take the lessons on teams learned over the last decades to the next level, applied in a number of specific areas. Here is the article title and abstract.

Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective

Rob Cross, Kate Ehrlich, Ross Dawson, and John Helferich

50/4 (Summer 2008): 74-98

Whether selling products or services, making strategic decisions, delivering solutions, or driving innovation, most work of any substance today is accomplished by teams. However, since the early 1990s, teams have evolved from more stable groups-where members were co-located, dedicated to a common mission, and directed by a single leader-to more matrixed entities with colleagues located around the world, juggling time between several projects, and accountable to multiple leaders. As teams have become more fluid, substantial challenges have been posed to traditional advice on team formation, leadership, roles, and process. This article describes how leaders at all levels within an organization can obtain innovation and performance benefits by shifting focus from forming teams to developing networks at key points of execution.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) (social network analysis applied to organizations) provides deep and specific insights into how to enhance the performance of organizations.

In the article we ask six questions to determine team effectiveness:

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Information filtering and reputation will be evolutionary battlefields

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When I wrote earlier Will our reputation systems be distributed? Probably not for a long time, a number of people noted that reputation systems will be gamed.

Absolutely. The more valuable a system is, the more people will try to game it. If reputation systems influence who people buy from, who they date, who they read, then massive efforts will be made to game the systems.

However the value of a reliable reputation system is such that it is worth doing anything possible to counter-act the gamers, and it is possible. The energy and money devoted to trying to game Google is extraordinary, yet these efforts have limited success.

In the last chapter of my book Living Networks I made a number of predictions for the future of the living networks, including that Information filtering will be an evolutionary battlefield.

While reputation is a slightly different space from information filtering, both are absolutely evolutionary battlefields where each party’s tactics will evolve in response to the others’, all the while creating valuable outcomes for users. Here is the excerpt from Living Networks.

Information filtering will be an evolutionary battlefield

Bats’ use of echolocation to find their prey is one of the marvels of nature. Bats produce high-frequency sounds, and by picking up and distinguishing the immensely quieter echoes off insects in the air, can instantaneously calculate the location of their next meal. The evolution of this extraordinary capability has led to moths evolving in response. The soft outside of their wings and bodies absorbs the bats’ ultrasound. Moths engage in evasive flying stunts when they hear bats squeaking. Some moths have even evolved the ability to produce ultrasound as well, possibly to startle and throw off bats. In turn, bats have developed complex flying behaviors to confuse moths, and occasionally turn off their echolocation to stop the moths jamming their signals.

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3 steps to creating participative strategy processes in organizations

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Some of my most interesting work in in helping clients create effective processes for participative strategy. The traditional approach to strategy is that it is generated in the executive suite or by highly-paid consultants, then it is communicated to staff, usually rather ineffectively.

There is an increasing recognition that many people across the organization have invaluable insights into industry change, competition, client requirements, innovation and other issues that will help shape strategy. The challenge is in establishing processes that enable broad-based participation in a useful way, tapping ideas and generating positive energy for change.

In some cases, for example as I helped a global real-estate development company to implement, this can be framed in a fun competition format, assisting teams to generate visions of where the company can go. In other cases, a formal process can be created to expose staff across the company to strategic issues, then generating, capturing, filtering, and applying their insights to corporate strategy, as I did for a large financial services company.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my book Living Networks providing some of the broader issues to address in implementing participative strategy.

CREATING PARTICIPATIVE STRATEGY

The Work-Out process is one of General Electric’s standard practices. This brings together 40 to 100 people in a “town meeting” to discuss specific issues, and make firm recommendations. Once the issues that need to be addressed have been identified, these are clearly defined by a team, and attendees for the meeting are selected from a range of functions and managerial levels. The team meet in an offsite location for usually three days, commencing with a briefing by the relevant executive, who then leaves. The participants break into a number of teams, and in a structured process come up with clear recommendations. At the end these are presented to the senior manager, who must make a decision on the spot whether to proceed. Work-Out sessions are routinely run across General Electric’s divisions, and often include customers and suppliers.

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