Thinking about the Future: Recognize That Strategic Foresight Is a Team Sport
From Andy Hines and Peter Bishop's book, Thinking About the Future, comes this advice: Recognize that Strategic Foresight is a Team Sport
A strategic foresight activity will benefit more if it gathers input from a team than from individuals. An interacting team provides diverse perspectives and enriches both the quality and quantity of the ideas considered.
A typical strategic foresight activity involves, from the very beginning, a core team that remains together throughout. The core team should include representatives from key stakeholder groups where practical, and can be enhanced by adding temporary members depending on the activity’s status and what kinds of expertise are needed. Thus, the size and composition of the team will likely fluctuate as the activity progresses, with the core members keeping the key learning intact.
Key steps: An initial consideration in putting together a team is the right size. Research by Richard Hackman (2002) suggests that for a core team, no more than six members are optimal. Once it grows beyond six, the productivity of the group begins to decline. Large groups are not well-suited to reaching closure and delivering an end product. Moreover, since individual contributions are usually less well-recognized in a large group, many people will not see the value of investing their time and effort in the activity if the group is too large. It is best to add and subtract people on an ad-hoc basis.
Assign core members to remain with the team for the duration of the activity. It is preferable to have 100% dedicated core team members wherever possible, as fractional commitments often lead to unfocused activity in which much time is spent simply updating team members about what has happened.
A second important consideration is that the core group should be directly involved in chartering the activity with sponsors. Additionally, although an analyst may rely on staff for some operational work, the core group should not become an advisory board. The members of this group should have the explicit charge to take a lead role in carrying out the work. A decision-maker should be among the participants, since neither the organizer nor the facilitator can step into this role. Participation enables the decision-maker to identify with both the process and the outputs.
Identify prospective ad-hoc members as early as possible. It is often difficult to get key experts or stakeholders to contribute their time, so the earlier the better. Others can always be added as more is learned and additional expertise or perspectives are required. At the same time, the analyst needs to avoid the perception that the process is elitist. This should be kept in mind while designing both the core group and the wider ad-hoc participation.
It is also advisable to include people with diverse thinking styles and perspectives. Some conflict within a team is actually healthy over the long run. Teams that share the same backgrounds and perspectives often fall into groupthink. At the same time, teams that are constantly at war are not productive either. Seek a balance of diversity such that conflicting views are put forward and heard, but participants are capable of coming to resolution and moving ahead.
Benefits: Involving a team in strategic foresight improves the quality of the solutions. In his recent popular book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), journalist James Surowiecki outlines how the mathematics of probability favors the ability of a group, over that of an individual, to pick the best solution. While the process may at times seem laborious and time-consuming, the collective judgment of a group improves the odds of devising the best solutions.
For example: Hackman (2002) describes the birth of Brooks’ Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Frederick Brooks managed the OS/360 systems programming project at IBM in the 1960s, then the largest such project ever undertaken. As the work fell behind schedule, the organization fell victim to the temptation to add staff to help catch up. Brooks, however, suggested that adding a dozen people to make up for being a dozen person-months behind was like assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each to produce a baby quicker. As he predicted, rather than speeding up the project the extra people slowed it down--leading to the emergence of Brooks’ Law.
Check back soon for another chapter from the book: Make strategic foresight as immersive and interactive as possible
Who should buy the book? Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight, co-edited by Social Technologies’ Director of Consulting Andy Hines and University of Houston Futures Professor Peter Bishop, is an essential reference guide for executives, educators and analysts. With input from 36 senior foresight professionals, the 231-page book is a powerful tool that analyzes the six phases of strategic foresight: framing, scanning, forecasting, visioning, planning, and acting. Order your copy.
Hope Katz Gibbs
in Publications, Futurism
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