Closing the Seeing-Being Gap
Closing the Seeing-Being Gap
Read on to learn what witchcraft and foresight have in common – and how you better prepare for the future.
radical Insights
Three years ago, a friend who has been a scenarios consultant for about 30 years told me that his work was in greater demand than it had been at any time since the late 1990s. It wasn’t hard to guess why: most organizations didn’t have contingency plans for anything like the disruption of work (and, at least temporarily, the transformations of the larger economy and culture) that accompanied a global pandemic. Many organizational leaders emerged understandably shaken, and more than a few were looking to broaden their thinking and shore up their adaptability. You know, just in case.
That upsurge of interest in scenarios is part of a much larger trend of increasing interest in practices for understanding and shaping futures amid a sense of high uncertainty and perpetual crisis. In business, this has manifested over the last half-decade as a growing appetite for trend reports, tech forecasts, and foresight work. In culture, a related impulse has shown up as a much-reported on wave of fascination with and consumption of new age spirituality and the occult (see also: WitchTok, Occulture, Progressive Occultism, etc.). Again… totally understandable?
Now, I’m not qualified to comment on internet witchcraft, but I have appreciated and benefited from the boom in foresight and futures work. The latter two, at least, offer something real, replicable, and valuable: an opportunity for organizations to “see” future possibilities, things that could and - in some cases - probably will be. Even on its own, the promise of a glimpse is tantalizing, but without a way to operationalize it, a glimpse of a possible or probable future doesn’t do a firm much good.
When it comes to futures, then, there’s a gap that exists between seeing and being (to riff on the old idea of a knowing-doing gap). For an organization to close that seeing-being gap and actually become the future it has envisioned, foresight isn’t enough. In an article for HBR last month, Amy Webb argues that companies need to meaningfully integrate foresight and strategy throughout the organization. I’d go a step further to suggest that translating organizational vision not only into strategy but into actual action and then sustaining a productive conversation between vision and action probably requires a deeper dual capability that we describe to our clients at radical as a kind of “ambidexterity.”
Pascal really unpacks this in the book, but here, I’ll just paraphrase the very useful idea of organizational ambidexterity (first explored by Michael Tushman and Charles O’Reilly) as the ability to build for tomorrow with one hand while effectively managing today with the other – and keeping all of the potentially contradictory processes, structures, and success metrics required straight and sensible at the higher leadership levels.
It certainly isn’t easy, but this capability is essential if we ever hope to realize the value of a future vision through bold action. In other words, it’s exactly what’s needed for a business to close the gap between seeing and actually being the future. @Jeffrey
What We Are Reading
📉 Google Layoffs Reflect the AI Disruption Most Companies Will Face Google’s intensified focus on AI, leading to additional layoffs, reflects broader concerns about job displacement in the “new industrial revolution,” as highlighted by the IMF. This emphasizes the need for social safety nets and retraining programs to address potential income inequality. @Jane
🧠 Artificial Stupidity: Can GPT Handle the Truth? GPT doesn’t think, comprehend, understand, reason, or have any judgment whatsoever. It views questions and answers as numerical patterns devoid of meaning or context. Neither truth, falsity, reliability, nor accuracy enter into it. Should it be widely used for legal purposes? @Mafe
🔄 Bringing True Strategic Foresight Back to Business If firms want to not only see future possibilities but also be able to effectively build/leverage them, strategy and foresight need to be exercised in tandem. @Jeffrey
🧊 Why They Matter Glaciers are crucial as they provide life-sustaining water for people and wildlife in certain regions. Additionally, they impact sea level rise and are essential for studying Earth’s climate history through ice core extraction. Seeing them in person is a magnificent experience! @Pedro
🤔 What Happened to GE? Bill Gates’ exploration, as a commentary on the book “Lights Out,” on how and why GE failed, is a good reminder that achieving sustainable relevance is an ongoing task. @Pascal
Bits & Pixels
» A good reminder that the Internet used to be a place we went to (even physically), which has morphed into “a terror that extends everywhere.”
» YouTube is massive: An estimated 13.3 billion videos, with the median video only receiving 39 views. YouTube is a strong long-tail business.
» Competition works: The Chinese fast-fashion powerhouse Shein forced Amazon to lower its seller referral fees from 17% to 5%.
» Move over Dolly, the sheep. For the first time, a cloned rhesus monkey has successfully reached adulthood.
» Not all technology lives up to its hype. Case in point: self-checkout technology.
» According to a study conducted by the San Francisco Fed, it was found that remote work, which accounts for approximately 30% of paid workdays, does not have an impact on productivity.
» Rosie from the Jetsons becomes real: Stanford’s mobile ALOHA robot learns from humans to cook, clean, and do laundry.
» Are pop lyrics getting more repetitive? With the use of software compression algorithms, we can now analyze this.
» The desire for standardization turns into an existential threat for cheese.
Some Fun Stuff
Ever taken a stroll through the Hall of ‘Oops’? A virtual tour through the delightful Museum of Failures unveils as much about failed products and services, as it does about why they were destined to fail. 😅 And remember: “Fail” is just an acronym for First Attempt In Learning.
Quote of the Week
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
— Ursula Le Guin