do you feel empowered to take action on the future?

One of the vital life learnings which many dismiss is that “life is change”. It has been my mission to help people and organizations deeply understand this fact of nature, learn to deal with this fact, and use it to forge their ideal futures. Part of forging your future is being and feeling sufficiently empowered to enable change within your organization.

Let’s do a short exercise. Let’s say you are at the end of your program. You have successfully developed your foresight practice and integrated it into your leadership skills. Now what? Do you feel that you would be able to execute your vision within your organization? Will you execute your learned skills and effect change within your organization or your client’s organization?

This is partially due to their perceptions. Many still believe that there is such a thing as “normal.” There is still a belief that we can somehow return to a “steady-state”. That the constant waves and wave of disruption will someday stop, or at least lessen. This isn’t very certain. Even if you understand this – it’s possible that the organization around you does not.

As part of the Foresight Leadership 25 point plan, we look into your empowerment. There is little point in continuing to develop your foresight practice unless it can lead to action.

If you are familiar with the concept of innovation theater (there is a lot of innovation talk, using the term, generating ideas, capturing ideas, playing with cool new toys, promoting the “fact” that your organization is “innovative”) with minimal innovation action (new real new products, services and, processes generated).

Even outside of innovation, there are many ineffective processes and cultures in place which, without objective justification other than “we’ve always done it this way” or “we tried this before, and it didn’t work”. While life and the world change in radical, disruptive ways outside of your organization, many feel that they can create a “steady-state” oasis within the organization.

However, this is fiction. While things may seem calm on the surface, the work required to maintain the steady state is likely not worth the effort.  It is much more effective to manage the disruption than to suppress or ignore it.

If you are going to embrace the future entirely, you will need to be empowered to create that future.

Do you feel empowered to forge your ideal future? Even if we develop and integrate the skill of foresight into our leadership practices and use it to develop a clear checklist for your perfect future, will you be able to execute the list to lead to that future?

Before you delve too deeply into your foresight leadership journey, do you feel that your organization will allow you to apply your foresight practices to real-world actions within and without your organization? Will you be able to implement the steps required to execute your foresight vision – communicate your idea in a compelling enough fashion to effect change?

If not – we cover this – and build an action plan for this – as well. Change is hard, and it is essential to make change management elements into your plan for change. How will you empower yourself – or how will you align your organization’s efforts to empower change. It’s essential to be empowered to change your organization to move forward into the future.