Strategic Foresight – Understanding the Negative Future – Nu Leadership Series

Strategic Foresight – Understanding the Negative Future – Nu Leadership Series

“It is not how extended you reside that counts but what you do in your lifetime that is significant. You obtained to find out how to offer with the storms of daily life.”

Rev. Richard Brown, Jr.

Do we truly want to pry into the foreseeable future? Some men and women do not want to look at it. Evidently, the potential is a highway with different lanes, but do people have the capacity to acknowledge not happy endings? In basic, it is my situation that human beings are incapable of accepting unhappy endings. In reality, futurist Edward Cornish argues that it is much easier for individuals to maintain a extended-phrase perspective when they have a clear vision. Futurists make the most of lots of tactics to anticipate the potential. For illustration, strategic foresight can present an avenue where companies can strategically analyze quick, mid-selection, and prolonged-phrase scheduling. Thus, it ‘s a look into the long run. This idea is effortlessly viewed on the Big Display screen. Hollywood blockbusters are the chronology of pleased endings. Folks want to believe that all stories have beneficial endings. This strategy is derived from childlike innocence as Americans. Sadly, the foreseeable future may perhaps consist of uncomfortable outcomes.

However, life would not usually provide a good tale. For case in point, globalization can offer several task opportunities, but the final result is not usually optimistic. In fact, the long term prediction for the total-time worker is bleak. It is evident that know-how and outsourcing are now earning the component-time worker a fact of now, not tomorrow. In actuality, Charles Handy theorized that unemployed or spare personnel will make their have new perform in the foreseeable future. For that reason, persons will handle their have future and turn out to be business owners. On the other hand, this operates counter to our American tradition. Grandma taught us “go get the job done for a good business and get a fantastic career with positive aspects.”

In simple fact, Bruce Sterling, writer of Tomorrow Now, further argues that easy, predictable, and solvable positions will go to the badly educated and unprepared or to smart equipment. Nonetheless, high-paying out employment will go to the very ready, teachable, and creative people today. In the foreseeable future, excellent positions will be the apex of human difficulty. Technologies and knowledge of intricate programs will demand a very well-grounded man or woman. Even so, futurist James Canton argues that American youth, our long run workers, will be unprepared in math/science and may be locked out of future possibilities.

Based mostly on a lot of observations, companies and persons don’t want to hear adverse eventualities for long term generations. This truth reaffirms that individuals never want to consider negatively about their future. Thus, they normally function in denial or dismiss the long run. Evidently, organizational leaders have to have to establish a strategy to deal with damaging repercussions. Quite a few individuals you should not have the tolerance to look outside of quick-time period gains. Therefore, successful leaders require to know how to deal with the alternatives of adverse futures.

References:

Canton, J. (2006). The Extraordinary Long run. New York: Dutton.
Cornish, E. (2002). Futuring: The Exploration of the Long term. Bethesda, MD: World Future Modern society.
Handy, C. (1997). The Age of Paradox. Boston, MA: Harvard Enterprise Faculty Push.
Sterling, B. (2002). Tomorrow Now. New York: Random House Publishers.

© 2008 by Daryl D. Environmentally friendly