8
Intriguing Incoherence

So, the first step of pioneering thinking is to know your current business model and identity, and the context in which you operate (covered in chapter 7).

When a business model and identity are coherent with their current context, magic happens. There is a clear purpose and relevance: an enterprise generates value to serve market needs. The business model and identity make sense within this context.

But what happens if the context changes?

Will your current business model and identity remain coherent within this context? Or will this new context render things incoherent?

COHERENCY IN CONTEXT

Kirsten Dunlop and Luca Gatti — strategy consultants and authors of The Strategic Risk Framework — suggest that this coherence is the true object of strategic thinking and decision-making. This elegant framing of strategy is simply profound, and has influenced my own thinking and approach to strategy immensely.

Dunlop and Gatti highlight that this simple approach — framing strategy in terms of the coherence between a business identity and its context — has the effect of empowering decision-makers to deal with extremely high levels of complexity.

Within this perspective, strategy becomes something much more dynamic and emergent — a relationship between current and emerging contexts, rather than a fixed document or plan. Dunlop and Gatti's approach also shifts the conversation about strategy from a quantitative focus (which tends to work in terms of probability) to that of a qualitative focus (which instead focuses on possibility).

Sometimes, this is a straightforward activity. An emerging new context may be known and predicted. With this knowledge, an enterprise can make strategic decisions to capitalise on opportunities and/or mitigate risks inherent within this anticipated new context.

Not all futures are clear and recognisable, and nor do all futures have a clear date at which they will come into effect. Rather, the ‘invisible forces' that threaten the future viability of your enterprise (and the latent opportunities that accompany them) are fuzzy and hard to discern, and could manifest and disrupt your enterprise very quickly.

The future is complex and uncertain, and it harbours an infinite range of possible contexts that could render your business unviable. But fear not, for this territory can be explored.

FINDING FUTURES

To find futures, we need to venture into the angst of uncertainty, and systematically and collectively use our imagination to explore what's possible.

Ha, I imagine that, right now, some gruff, hardcore, old-school, traditionally minded and operationally driven leaders have just stopped reading. They're probably looking for an evidence-based approach. That's fine — let them go.

But, if you're still with me, good. This is important.

Many folk shy away from exploring possibility within the complexity of an uncertain future. Instead, they seek the safety of familiar, evidence-based approaches, and solid numbers from which to assess the probability of certain futures manifesting. Such an approach does little to address the infinite complexity of the future. Akin to setting forth ‘a clear goal' or ‘vision for the future', a focus on probability (rather than possibility) simply creates the delusion of certainty while reducing the range of possible future contexts leaders are inclined to explore. The result of such a conventional, evidence-based and probability-biased approach is that we're left with a set intelligence similar to that which anyone else can develop or access. Therefore, such an approach does not generate any sort of distinct strategic advantage — it merely produces the same set of options your competitors have.

Quest-Augmented Strategy is not simply about generating the same set of options that any conventional approach might offer. This is about equipping enterprise leaders with new, viable alternative options to augment default strategy. It's only through this approach that we can unlock new value and new growth arcs, and maintain enduring relevance.

To find these options, we must be able to imagine futures that exist beyond the realms of likely probability.^[1]

FACT OR FUTURE?

Futures cannot be represented through facts. Facts, like evidence, can only exist by being observed. This means that, by the time the fact has been observed, it has already happened. Don't look for facts or answers — look for better questions. It's the questions we ask, and the meaning we explore, that will generate the insights most useful to strategy.

I've already mentioned Einstein's belief that imagination is more important than knowledge. And certainty, when it comes to anticipating possibility and new future contexts, this is the case. Knowledge only serves to reflect the sum of what we know. Imagination is the gateway to that which is not yet known.

But enough philosophy! Here are seven almost-practical perspectives you can use to explore complex and uncertain futures.

^[2] All of these perspectives encourage divergent thinking and exploration.

Here be Dragons: The goal here is to enrich our understanding of diverse possible futures. At this stage, we're not trying to fix anything, and we're not trying to make strategic decisions about our current business model or identity. Not yet. We are simply seeking to understand what possible future contexts might lay ahead.

While you'll want to be careful not to constrain your focus, it is good to start the process of pioneering thinking with some sense of the changes believed to be of strategic significance to your enterprise. Generally speaking, these aspects will include things like technology, the economy, society and the environment (and the structural changes inherent within them).

So, let's get into the perspectives you can use.

Reverse assumptions

This is a very useful perspective to embrace early in any process that encourages divergent thinking. Thanks to the Curse of Efficiency, one of the first things we naturally do in an explorative session is seek to conclude it. To find the ‘right answer' — to tick that box, be done and move on to the next challenge.

But explorative thinking — and the envisioning of complex, uncertain futures — doesn't work like this. There are no right answers.

And so, rather than charging in with what we think are the best answers to the most probable scenarios, a good trip-wire to default thinking is to reverse our assumptions.

Here, we write down what we suspect to be true about the future. For example, if we're thinking in terms of retail, we might imagine possible future contexts where all shopping is done online, a universal digital cryptocurrency is at play, and many items are delivered digitally to your 3D-printer at home (saving consumers money and minimising waste).

Now, these may be valid elements of possible future contexts. And you could feel quite smug coming up with these ideas — so smug that you remain closed to other possibilities. Which is not useful, at this point.

So, to prevent this from happening, look at the assumptions you have about the future, and reverse them. What new possibilities exist?

Maybe in the future hacking becomes so sophisticated, and people are so fearful about identity theft and unsolicited data acquisition, that online shopping actually diminishes (or is more frequently performed via a proxy). This leads to a return to more ‘traditional' forms of trade.

Maybe a universal digital cryptocurrency does emerge — but maybe a range of company ‘loyalty' programs also provide the equivalent effect of digital currency. By participating in research and allowing access to personal sensors, for example, one can accrue currency that can be used for any goods or services of a particular corporation and its partners. Maybe these ‘loyalty' wars become so intense that customer loyalty ‘points' become the new currency?

Or maybe 3D-printing actually turns out to be a short-lived fad. Thanks to the meta-web, people actually find they don't need to shop for physical items anymore, because most of their time is invested online. Digital items and artefacts become more important. Homes are fitted out with complex holographics, and so on.

All of these future scenarios are equally possible and valid — but we may not have got to them if we hadn't reversed our assumptions.

Resist solutions, conclusions and judgements

While ‘solutions-focused' and ‘outcomes-orientated' might appear on the resumes of the desperately bland corporate folk, such notions should not contaminate pioneering thinking. Training ourselves out of the need to jump to quick fixes, and to remain in the angst and tension of uncertainty, takes a while — but doing so almost always leads to better thinking.

Similar to our desire to find the right answers, it is natural for us to seek to ease the tension of uncertainty with quick solutions. But, at this point in our pioneering thinking, we are not seeking to solve anything. We're exploring. Anything that draws this process to a conclusion robs us of further exploration. Likewise, judging something to be correct or incorrect — before we have conducted any experiments to validate it — is also of little use.

Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen, suggests that teams create a backburner for new ideas. In the same way as a cook might use the backburners of a stove for a pot that doesn't require his or her immediate attention, a backburner for ideas is a place to keep them warm but out of the way, so that we can avoid being distracted from the mission at hand.^[3]

But if we are engaged in pioneering thinking, we almost need the opposite of a backburner — a place to store potential actions, missions or projects, so that they don't distract us from the exploring that is ahead of us. Let's call it the fridge. If you're engaged in pioneering thinking with your team and want to identify possible future contexts, put distractions in the fridge.^[4] Create a safe space to capture this thinking, so that you can stay with the task at hand.

Explore trends

Each year Gartner, the information technology research and advisory firm I mention in chapter 3, publish a branded model called the ‘Hype Cycle'. This model represents the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies, tracking them through the various stages of hype.

The first part of the cycle is the initial innovation, proof of concept or technological breakthrough. This is what pioneering organisations want to be keeping an eye on. At the time of writing this book, technological triggers such as quantum computing, bio-acoustic sensing, virtual personal assistants, 3D-bioprinting and brain–computer interface technology are emerging. Media fall in love with the ‘newness' of this technology, and things quickly get hyped up.

Technologies such as the Internet of Things, wearable technology and cryptocurrency are already at the second phase, which Gartner describes as ‘the peak of inflated expectations'. Early adopters and fast followers begin to play with the new technology. Negative media publications begin.

Next in the cycle comes the ‘trough of disillusionment', where the reality of the technology does not meet the hype generated by media. One can currently find things like gamification, augmented reality and mobile health monitoring in this part of the Hype Cycle. In my experience, this is where some of the slower enterprise leaders hear about things for the very first time.^[5] At this stage, less than 5 per cent of the potential audience have adopted fully.

What follows next is ‘the slope of enlightenment'. More enterprises understand how the new technology can be used, and further iterations mean that some of the awkward elements of the early prototypes have been smoothed out. Gesture control, in-memory analytics and 3D-scanning are examples of technologies currently in this phase.^[6]

Finally comes the ‘plateau of productivity', where 20 to 30 per cent of the potential audience has heard of the innovation. Things enter a crazy growth period, and larger enterprises attempt to jump on the bandwagon (following progress, rather than leading it).^[7]

The Gartner Hype Cycle is one of the quickest ways to get a rough initial sense of what technologies are emerging, and it can be a great starting point for discussion and enquiry into possible futures.

But the Gartner Hype Cycle only represents the major technological trends.

Technology will always be a great catalyst, but when you start to combine these trends with sociodemographic trends, consumer trends, geopolitical shifts and other such movements, the real magic emerges.

For example, take the emerging trend of wearable technology, combine that with virtual personal assistants, throw in a workforce shift to more remote and/or freelance work, and what do you get? Or, combine remote health monitoring with the fact that some countries are now producing greater numbers of qualified medical practitioners who are happy to work for a fraction of the fee of their counterparts in higher-taxed countries. What future do we have here?

Exploring the overlaps and gaps between trends is a very useful way to generate a richer perspective of possible futures.

Establish feeds

Pioneering leadership requires our hunches to be kept well fed. We do this by being mindful of our feeds — the channels we have established to feed us information.

In my experience, few leaders are aware of their information diet. They have often formed habitual routines that see them receive information from a small range of familiar sources — the newspaper in the morning, for example, maybe a few key news websites during the day, and then maybe the news on the television in the evening.^[8]

At best, the default information diet serves to validate existing world views and default thinking. At worst, it's addictive, amplifies cognitive bias, and diminishes mental health. Rolf Dobelli, author of Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet, suggests that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body — that it is overly negative, distorts reality, and amplifies insecurity, pessimism and fear (which tends to lead to a more conservative and myopic outlook).

But what's the solution? Abandon news altogether?^[9]

As Mark Twain once said, ‘If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.'

The solution, as is often the case, lies somewhere in-between. And, it starts with self-awareness.

Remember — as a leader, your attention is your most valuable resource.

So, here's an actionable insight for you. For one week, see if you can track your information diet. Identify where your attention is placed. It'll be kind of like a food diary — but instead of trying to creatively categorise peanut-butter brownies, here you are focused on what information you consume (and, more importantly, from where).^[10] The timing of your information consumption can be insightful for you too.

What you may find is that you rely on only a few information outlets. If you also overlay this with your natural energy shifts throughout the day, you might discover some interesting opportunities. For example, mornings are an incredibly productive time for me. But, in the past I would start my day with social media and email, which diminished my capacity to capitalise on my most productive time.

Maybe you have a similar thing going on. Maybe you read negative news before you plan your day in the morning. And maybe the media you consume is having a subtle, influential effect on the way you think, and the decisions you make.

In order to envisage complex and uncertain futures, we need to expose ourselves to diverse new information feeds. And this can easily be established in a few simple steps.

For starters, use a curated and adaptive news aggregator to keep abreast of key trends. Several simple options are available nowadays, and they'll work across your devices. The best thing about this is that you'll be able to specify the key trends you wish to monitor, new technology key words, and other future shifts. Then, each day you'll be fed new information from diverse fields within the diverse frame of reference you have provided. Even better, the cleverer apps will learn your reading habits — providing you with more relevant information over time.

If you want to take this to the next level, you can create opportunities to discuss new ideas with colleagues.^[11] The savvier organisations I've worked with have a thriving and dynamic internal social network. Leaders model pioneering behaviour, and the enterprise benefits from the diverse collective input of its employees. Discussions are started around new ideas, and a growing database of intelligence is gathered around key themes. Books are discussed, conference notes are shared, and learning is an actively valued part of every day.

Dial up diversity

We tend to surround ourselves with people who think like us. This makes for cognitive ease, because our default world view is unlikely to be challenged or confronted. This might be fine for very small teams doing formulaic work in tight parameters with predictable outcomes. But if you're leading, thinking or pioneering, a lack of diversity is woeful.

I'm not simply talking about gender diversity^[12] but the full spectrum: age, culture, expertise and experience. The more diverse thinking styles and perspectives you can access, the better your ability to think strategically and consider complex future contexts.

Now, I fancy myself as quite the progressive person: I'm pro science, equality and diversity. But I still make an effort to keep abreast of folks who offer bizarre points of view.^[13] The reason being that we all run the risk of creating our own filter bubble — a scenario by which we only expose ourselves to perspectives that support, validate and reinforce our default world view. This is usually how we make friends — we get along with them because they share similar interests, values and political outlook. But our life (and our thinking) is much richer with diversity.

Find the friction

The areas ripe for innovation and disruption are those in which unnecessary friction exists. Friction is the stuff that slows things down. Thanks to our inherent laziness (and the Curse of Efficiency), we are always seeking faster and more efficient ways to do things. This asymptotic^[14] need for efficiency is the primary driver for most of the innovation we see in the market today. If your enterprise is not helping to reduce the friction between the value it generates and customers accessing it (your channels), you can bet someone else is thinking about disrupting this space.

When exploring complex futures, a common thread may be that a key element of friction has been removed — and this has changed things dramatically.

Here's an example. Imagine you've recently entered a midlife crisis and bought yourself a ‘cafe racer' motorcycle. Life is good — you're still a bit scared to ride it, but you like polishing it and taking Instagram selfies with it. After its second service, you're informed that a small part is missing. Your mechanic can order it in, but it's going to cost a fair bit of cash, and it'll take a few weeks to be delivered.

In a not too distant future, the mechanic would instead be able to download the schematics of the missing part and use a 3D-printer to print the required component as part of the service. Hence, a big piece of friction would be removed.

What if a key element of the ecology in which your enterprise exists were rendered frictionless? What might that future look like?

Carve out time for exploration

So far we've explored things that can happily happen in your own time, without directly encroaching upon the existing default work of an enterprise. This might be due to my own bias towards introversion, but the reality is you've got to make this a reality at work. Leaders need to lead this, and demonstrate the kinds of pioneering behaviours you want others to emulate. If curiosity and thorough strategic thinking are important, you need to ensure that the time dedicated to these activities is not consumed by the urgency of default operational work.

In chapter 21, you'll find a set of actionable insights for different time intervals. Keep in mind that obtaining a rich sense of what's possible — piercing through the complexity of an uncertain future and moving beyond default probabilities — takes time.

And remember: the purpose behind exploring possible futures is to generate new thinking — which, in turn may stimulate new pathways to competitive strategic advantage for your enterprise.

FRAMING FUTURES

Using diverse perspectives to identify possible futures is one thing. But then we need to be able to frame them appropriately if their meaning is to be conveyed.

And the best way to do this is with narrative.

Since the dawn of civilisation, narrative has been used by our species to develop and share our understanding of complex phenomena — everything from ethics and philosophy, to physics and ecology.^[15] Being able to use narrative to describe possible futures is the quickest way to cut through complexity.

Consider this simple example narrative of a possible future:

Upon reading that story, your mind will instantly create a web of assumptions in order to manage the complexity of the concept. The result is a future context that we can relate to and understand fairly quickly.

Here's another narrative:

This narrative suggests a similar and yet very distinct future context — a context in which artificial intelligence has enough widespread acceptance that it can be utilised to adjudicate human affairs. And that such an entity could be developed and leased by different corporations.

And now here's a rather different narrative:

This last narrative is happening right now, and will manifest to a much greater extent in our near future. By reading this, we get a sense of this future context. We can perceive some of the complexities of this future, through the power of narrative.

You'll notice that in each example, I adopted the newsreader persona. This was deliberate. When framing future worlds, it's easy to get lost in the infinite complexity and possibility of it all.^[16] The newsreader persona allows us to capture glimpses of these future contexts in a way that is compelling — the better news stories are good at capturing attention and conveying meaning with an economy of words.

So! If you're leaning into the collective challenge of pioneering thinking and envisaging potential future contexts, an easy framework to adopt is that of a newspaper or news bulletin.

This idea comes from a variety of sources — my friend Dr Amantha Imber, author of The Innovation Formula, teaches a similar technique as a way to convey ideas succinctly and meaningfully; Luca Gatti and Kirsten Dunlop also advocate this approach in their Strategic Risk Framework; and the Association of Professional Futurists uses frameworks akin to a weather forecast. You too can create a narrative context to frame potential futures.

If you're running this activity remotely, or asynchronously (as may be the case across multinational organisations), you may even want to adhere to a ‘newspaper' template.^[17] This is quite simple: imagine what the front page of a newspaper (or news website) might look like if it were to come from this future context.

Include the following sections: headlines, a major story describing a representative effect of a major disruption, a snapshot on world news, a local/personal/everyday interest story, and a category relevant to your enterprise.

If you're running this activity with a group, together in the same room, you may also want to use a ‘news bulletin' template. Here, teams deliver short news bulletins that feature a set of stories from the future across a range of news categories.

Ideally, this is both an ongoing activity (forming a small part of weekly and monthly rituals for individuals and teams), and a specific event (like a three-day immersion). At the end of such an event, you'd hope to have between twelve and twenty different future contexts ‘captured' and expressed in narrative form.

NOTHING IS TRUE

Remember: the role of stories and narrative is to help us conceptualise and comprehend infinitely complex possible future contexts. The point of a story is not to convince or convert others to a ‘truth', but rather to offer a vision of a possible truth. ‘Storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to a horizonal way of seeing,' philosopher James Carse beautifully observes.

Alas, the only way to determine if a possible imagined future is true is to observe it. But that means waiting until it has happened, which is hardly proactive or strategic. And so, to reconcile the fact that no story is true (yet) — and to avoid simply subscribing to probability (like anyone can do) — we hedge our bets and work to capture a wide range of possible future contexts.

Here, the breadth and diversity of this range of possible futures is more important than the depth and detail of the narratives that represent them. With more possible futures, our pioneering thinking is stretched even further — enhancing the likelihood of future contexts that are surprisingly different. The variety of these future contexts might serve to test our current business model and identify refreshingly new and useful ways of doing business.

And so, with such futures mapped out, we can explore the third and final part of this puzzle — incoherence.

SEEKING INCOHERENCE

When we begin to seek out possible incoherencies, we're looking for the state at which a possible future context may render your current business model and identity unviable.

These are always the things that seem obvious in hindsight. Today, people scoff at Kodak scoffing at the thought of digital cameras disrupting their industry. At the time (despite having dabbled in digital cameras themselves) Kodak saw their identity as a producer of photographic film — the arrogance of their past successes and growth saw them dismiss the threat of digital cameras (a capability they had already demonstrated).

If Kodak had engaged in Quest-Augmented Strategy — if they had pioneered beyond default thinking and imagined possible future contexts in which no-one would want to use fragile and expensive film (or wait for their photos to get developed) — then maybe they would have realised that their identity and business model needed to be refreshed. They might have re-imagined their identity as preservers of memories and, in so doing, opened up new avenues of relevance and growth.

But alas: arrogance and the Curse of Efficiency saw this once great enterprise meet the Kraken. Let's ensure that doesn't happen to you.

To find possible pathways and alternative strategic options for an enterprise, we need to contrast our existing business model and identity against the possible future contexts we have identified.

Here, we go through and ask the same questions we asked when establishing our understanding of our current business model and identity, going through similar components — such as the market need, our customer segments, channels, and key partners and activities. But this time, we explore these elements from within this new future context, noting down where our business model may be rendered incoherent or unviable.

For example, if you were in the insurance industry, a possible^[18] future might be one in which identity theft^[19] is a real and common thing — so much so that people seek out enterprises that may be able to protect them from such risk (or at least mitigate its effect). More so, individuals may seek greater protection for their own privacy, and the security of their data. And within this future, it may be possible that new identities are available for purchase — thanks to clever algorithms and an army of bots who can mimic an individual's online activities. If you were to look at your current business model from within this context, you might find some significant gaps — or that your primary value proposition is no longer relevant.

If this is the case — rejoice! For now you have a new, optional strategic pathway to monitor and consider. Do this across each of the imagined future contexts, and you'll have a range of alternative options to consider.