CHAPTER 5

Anticipatory Leadership: Preparing

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

—C. S. Lewis | “Learning in War Time,” in The Weight of Glory

The matter of innovation is inherently future-oriented as it directs itself to the “new” and “different,” regardless of whether that means new materials, products, or services in whole, part, or use. Often, the latter—that of use—is overlooked, but it bears an increasingly important role among innovating—especially in the pharmaceutical industry, where the creation and patenting of new molecules is increasingly expensive and yielding weaker returns (Philipson and Hult 2015).¹ The reason for its importance is how it relates to framing one’s most basic and critical assumptions. Like the illusionary magic of Vaudeville and Vegas, what you see is not necessarily what you get, and that is due to what you see being more a function of “how” you see than a matter of the content itself. To be clear, the subjects of our perceptions are not always fixed, but when they are, how we perceive is critical to our capacity to transmit back that information. For instance, being color-blind makes a difference in our analysis. Our understanding of cultural cues and social norms makes a difference. Our foundational understandings of how the world works and how people relate makes a difference. These are the critical assumptions that affect our interpretation of why business deals succeed or fail, marriages prosper or fall apart, children mature or follow the wrong path, and so on. Thus, it goes without saying that no one arrives at the innovating table without presuppositions about a slew of important concerns. Additionally, and more broadly speaking, no leader or firm approaches the innovation problem without the need to take their presuppositional reality into consideration. For that reason, if you hope to innovate well, you need to learn the practices of anticipatory leadership.

What It Is: The Mindset and Language

Anticipatory leadership, simplified, is the integration of strategic foresight skillsets into the leadership process for the sake of an organization’s (good) future. If you remember from the discussion in Chapter 3 about strategic management, strategic foresight is an integral component of the strategic thinking activity. What I am arguing here, then, is that anticipatory leadership is almost exclusively a practice of leadership primed to lead strategic thinking efforts well. That is not to say this leadership practice will not also support and strengthen other strategic management practices. It will. In fact, it is definitely not possible to remove this capacity for action once you have trained in it. Yes, you can forget to apply its principles, but just like how a rubber band, once stretched out, no longer shrinks to the same size, so also will it be difficult for your mind to constrict to its original perspective having already grasped the significant implications of acknowledging and using alternative futures. Furthermore, since I have explained how strategic thinking is an ongoing activity in innovation-minded and strategic-choice-oriented organizations, then anticipatory leadership is both a standalone and an additive leadership paradigm. You can be engaged in anticipatory leadership amid strategic thinking activities, but you can also bring anticipatory leadership into other leadership practices to challenge their inflexibility. Notice what I am not saying: I am not calling anyone to become an anticipatory leader, and neither will I stress strategic leader or administrative leader. My point is that we need integrative leaders. Just as our field stresses the multiplicity of variables that force us into complexity, so also should we recognize the complexity of being a leader. The complexity of our circumstances demands a multiplicity of leadership practices. That is what the integrative leadership model stresses: the multiplicity of demands upon leadership, which anticipatory, strategic, and administrative perspectives provide for.

That being said, you do not need to be positioned as the leader to practice strategic foresight and alternative futures framing, but since its successful practice is the objective of strategic thinking, then it logically follows that strategic foresight should be practiced in the leadership context. I believe the field of leadership aims to successfully practice strategic foresight—regardless of whether leaders are studying its application or not—because leadership is a process of influencing to reach a common goal. Such a purpose is innately future-oriented. We can no longer deny that circumstances will change from the time we determine the common goal up until the point at which it is reached or that success is no longer an option. We need to accept, therefore, that the minds that can appraise the in-between time best are those which are sharpest in accounting for how many ways everything can go better or worse.

In the realm of leadership, all kinds of mental models take effect. Of the many which target understanding as their goal, focus is generally bounded to either micro, meso, and/or macro contexts. With regard to anticipatory leadership, the driving model is one of external environment evaluation, and the most expansive at that. First, anticipatory leadership is particularly important in helping frame the innovation environment. According to foresight educators Drs. Peter Bishop and Andy Hines, the process of thinking about the future can be divided into four categories with two response categories appended afterward. They are framing, scanning, forecasting, visioning, planning, and acting.² The first four deal with understanding:

1. What is the purpose for applying foresight?
2. What is currently driving the future, and what could break that trajectory?
3. What futures are most probable, and what are critical measures for monitoring each?
4. What is the most desirable path into the future?

Though each process component is vital to quality outcomes, the scanning component, as mentioned in Chapter 3, is especially important as a feeder activity for the others. The importance of assumptions as the building blocks of organizational and environmental paradigms has been addressed, and so framing, to that end has been introduced.

With framing in place, the scanning activity illustrates how foundational the external environments’ cues are for innovation, as they provide the critical resources for innovation decision making. To explain, consider the fairly well-known scanning framework STEEP (social, technological, economical, environmental, political). An acronym for macro-contextual events, ideas, social developments, technological cultivation, political shifts, and more, the STEEP framework, when used in organizational strategy workshops, can help organizations map—and make sense of—large external environments (often, but not necessarily global). The end-game of the STEEP exercise is to generate understanding as to macro-environmental drivers, those currents of change that can shape the landscape of a society and therefore its industries. Such changes can dramatically affect an organization’s future if the innovations surrounding an industry are changing at a speed faster or moving in an entirely different direction than the industry itself. The same can be said for how these kinds of drivers can portend conflicts in social values between minority groups and society at large. Such scanning provides the material for intelligent analysis and forecasting (and identifying points of intervention for effective systemic disruption). Against those forecasts, a more enlightened vision for the organization or industry can be considered and mapped out—at least compared to existing organizational or industrywide visions, which may have no qualified basis in the macro-environment.

Second, and building on the importance of gathering and interpreting varied data points, the comprehension of the external environment stems from the goal for strategic foresight—insight for present action. Foresight is external awareness. Condensed, its power is akin to that extra split-second buffer, which providentially leads to a critical swerving away from the future’s jack-knifing semi, saving us rather than forcing a family tragedy. Since foresight creates that gap of time, strategic foresight is the wise use of that gap to brace for whatever future arrives. Using the adaptive cycle concept, strategic foresight is the process by which we come to entrepreneurial solutions. In the competitive environment of health care, it helps us ask where we should be applying assets and effort. Like a real-estate mogul speculates what land will be valuable next, so we need to be conscientious speculators as to what values and technologies will be valuable in the future.

One major difference for the health care leader, however, is that this practice of anticipation is a powerful defensive posture to protect our patients against the kind of scarcity that raises costs. Who minds being able to market that their organization saves the city and its patients’ time and money, beats industry standards in minimizing the tax burden they place on city residents (if applicable), has higher satisfaction scores, etc.? You should love to brag about the exceptionalism of your organization, but you must think forward and prepare in order to earn those victories. They rarely come by chance. Maybe none of your competitors engage in this either, but neither can they brag about it. No one wins. So take the time to entrench this in practice. Intentionally think about what your future conditions could be like, how different they could look (not just good and bad turns for present issues). Use this to reflect on the efficacy of your operations and how you make strategies. Use it to learn what your role as a future health care organization should be. Use it to identify and make what might be life-saving course corrections before you do not have the capability.

Time Outlook and Perspective

We previously discussed Voros’ model and why we need to acquire data for strategic foresight’s analysis, interpretation, and prospection, by which we take note of what the future could be like to integrate emerging insights from that vision with the strategy development, planning, and operations of our organizations. One key component to the anticipatory mindset is referred to as time outlook and time perspective. Over twenty years ago, Peg Thoms and David Greenberger published a fascinating journal article in which they considered the relationship between leadership and time orientation.³ In their research, they discovered that two leadership theories encapsulated a time outlook across the past, present, and future. These were the charismatic leadership theory and a specific formulation of the transformational leadership theory. Other theories that did not relate with all three outlooks but which oriented with at least the future outlook included path-goal theory and entrepreneur role theory. What I hope you can see from that information is that leadership theories implicitly oriented with a future outlook tend to be identifications of leadership that focus on change.

Because our work experiences do not always call for a future orientation, the authors argue that, “individual biases related to the past, present, and future are associated with specific skills needed to perform various tasks typically completed by leaders in situations in which leaders often find themselves,” meaning we become inclined to work in the time orientation we operate in most often.⁴ For example, if our primary work is leading accounting efforts in our health care organization, then we will likely have a present orientation; while financial asset management may incline us to be more future oriented. It becomes probable, then, that jumping into activities that call for the opposite time outlook will be obstructed by our bias and more difficult for us to learn. In this vein, the authors write that,

Some tasks, like visioning, planning, goal setting, and motivating are future-oriented tasks and will be performed best by leaders who can warp time, create future schema, and predict. Other tasks, like performance evaluation and problem solving require leaders who can recapture the past.⁵

The purpose of understanding that we, as leaders, have natural comfortability with different time orientations is in recognizing why we might distrust future-oriented tasks—which I hope you understand are vitally important and not to be sluffed off as some kind of imagination games. Moreover, when you take the orientation best aligned for the kind of leadership task at hand, then their research argued you are likely to be more effective in the task completion, that is, you will craft better visions if you can attune to the future, and you will evaluate performance more accurately if you attune to the past. One interesting point that emerged from a related study was that women scored significantly higher than men in regard to holding a future orientation, which should certainly give added credence to your need for a diverse strategic management team.⁶

What the Future Is

The future does not exist. That is both an uninteresting and immensely profound statement. In one sense, we know the future has not yet come to pass, and so it does not yet exist; but, in another sense, the future is simply a conception that only exists in the present. We can only speak about what is yet to come as “the future” when it is yet to come, and so it never comes into existence. It ever remains out there, somewhere. Please pardon my philosophical drift. I shared that purposefully to help you grasp the complexity of talking about the future and being on the same page with your strategic management team. In order to engage the strategic foresight process and everything that comes with strategic thinking particularly well, you need to be able to have common terminology and expectations for the process. This is difficult with regard to thinking and discussing and deciding about the future.

In essence, there are two schools of thought, and they are based on understanding that previous statement. Within those schools, there is further divergence and nuance, but those two schools remain hinged to assuming either that the future exists as an object headed toward the present, being knowable or unknowable but nonetheless real, or that the future is a mental illusion, just a useful conceit for untethering us from widely held assumptions. The former deals with questions of knowing, and the latter deals with questions of being. As it pertains to health care organizations, both schools of thought are necessary. Such a strong opinion might frighten my colleagues, because we have to choose, right? Wrong. We have to understand and use each appropriately in this instance. These are assumptions that define how we perceive, like lenses that determine color shading, and unlike lenses that determine clarity. Let me give you a couple of reasons why you need them both. First, the school that recognizes the future as a fact headed for now is a school that can motivate present action to shape it or reshape their own organization in expectation of its arrival. The school that denies the future as having being outside of the present grants us freedom from the notion that a particularly imagined future is unavoidable or predetermined for us. In these ways, both schools promote a freedom to act in the present with creative legitimacy.⁷

Second, one school gives us a power to plan through its assumptions about probability and forecasting while the second gives us the power intelligently break with plans and acknowledge the power of creative activity to generate the present, that is, one school promotes trajectory alignment and future-capture whereas the other promotes present-expansion. Futures expert Riel Miller explains the argument for what I call the second school this way:

The challenge is not to find better ways to “know” the future; rather we need to find ways to embrace the creative novelty that is at the origin of not-knowing the future…The point is not to find methods for attacking, overcoming or reducing the unknown. Rather the goal is to accept and use the unknown, to sustain it and still exercise our intention and volition (Ogilvy, 2010). The bottom line is that … to create a better world we need to change how we think about the future not what.⁸

In that sense, the future is a tool for learning about how we think, how we plan, what we fear, and what we value. It helps us uncover what lay hidden beneath the surface of our decision making as well as gives us more robust understanding regarding our organization’s mission and vision. As health care leaders, such exercises are vital to ensure we do not lose our aim to serve with the utmost integrity. It would be tragic to find ourselves falsely enslaved, operating to serve a nonexistent master at the cost of our souls.

What It Does: The Tools

Social Change Theory

The tools that might be used in the practice of anticipatory leadership are legion. They could range from big data analytics and census surveys to imaginative exercises like storytelling. Below, therefore, I will highlight a few of what I consider the most useful introductory tools for thinking strategically in order to lead with an anticipative posture. To begin, it would be helpful for you to have a basic working knowledge and usable framework of key theories of social change, since innovating is ultimately focused on the adoption of innovations in key segments of, or across all of, society. There are at least four broad categories of such theories: evolutionary, conflict, structural-functional, and social-psychological.⁹ Have no fear, there will be no tests! In simplified terms, the first deals with the notion that society moves from lesser to greater complexity and differentiation. The second posits the notion that competition for scarce resources elicits change; the third argues for a systems approach where changes occur as the offsetting of other societal changes in an effort to maintain balance; and the fourth points to individuals’ behavioral shifts as the impetus for cascading change (little changes in behavior adding up). The value in understanding these four kinds of social change is that by understanding them, you can use them. You can make plausible assumptions about the future according to how society changes. This is why social change matters to you, because you can expect change to follow a pattern or roadmap. The future will be expected to bend in a certain direction, by a certain amount, so often, with a certain kind of ignition. As you grasp why change occurs, then you will likely have a better shot in crafting innovations that are more readily adoptable.

In addition, if forecasts of society at large can be argued for or against, then so can strategies for innovation in response, that is, you can set a strategy intentionally crafted for effective adoption based on the kind of social change assumptions you are operating under. By that I mean if you can argue for a particular change pattern across larger social segments, then you may also argue for the need to innovate in order to meet that change head-on or to utilize that change for your competitive advantage. But, caveat emptor, if the theory of change that undergirds your forecasting is inaccurate, meaning reality did not care about your expectations and decided to run rampant upon your assumptions, then your forecasts will be off and your innovation assumptions potentially worthless. Of course, in your organization, your innovations may be of a smaller variety, pertaining mostly to how you organize staff and schedule, what kinds of team practices you engage in to save time and increase communication across units, craft marketing efforts that draw in clients with substantially higher conversion rates, the kind that affect your local or regional market but are not likely to reshape your industry. This does not mean the innovation emphasis within your organization should diminish; rather, it means your organization may actually be somewhat more protected from the kinds of innovation that would—to their fault—rely on those faulty forecast assumptions. The reason I say this is that your innovation efforts will likely be those you can afford and the kind you believe will be necessary according to your forecasting. Based on your forecasts, you will do what your resources permit, and so in all likelihood, the innovations you deploy will be in relation to personnel and assets you can use differently than others. Only a handful of you will be innovating with regard to high-value technical assets and that is perfectly normal. We have grown into a society that thinks innovation and technology are automatically only industry-rocking and computer-oriented, but if you remember points in Chapter 2, innovation relates to business model changes at least as much as it does to technology changes. Even with regard to technology, innovation is less about the technology itself and more about how it is used. The better use of information rather than the hard material is the value-adding component that innovation offers, that is, it is no longer the microprocessor that most often makes the greatest difference; now it is the software running them and running on them that alters the computing landscape most. Here is one last comment on these theories as you watch your own industry and your competitors within it, and especially as you monitor their future-focused decisions: unity regarding what view is the dominant theory of social change in effect will be critical to innovation-making processes and resulting activities. The more robust an organization’s future view, the more likely its engagement in innovation making will not follow simple predictions, and the more competitive its offerings can become. Thus, even having a rudimentary understanding of those four theories and why social change is an important field of study for anticipatory leadership will benefit you more than you can yet imagine.

Scenario Planning

Scenarios are fictional glimpses of the future. They are not prophecies or predictions, since the former should never be fictional and the latter go beyond the intent of scenario planning. Rather, scenarios are useful in strategic thinking efforts because looking at strategy concerns through various scenarios provides decision makers with a view as to how strategic maneuvers may play out, especially valuable in modern, unpredictable arenas like health care. Scenarios, therefore, provide imagined environments for gaming present strategies in order to identify weaknesses in our assumptions, highlight our blind spots, and locate untapped potential. There are three reasons to use scenarios: (1) to discuss big issues about the future, (2) to plan for the future, and (3) to enrich organizational learning. When current strategies are gamed through the alternative futures which scenarios represent, team members are forced to logically embrace a greater awareness of how varying macro-environmental factors could interact with their planned decision-paths—how plausible events and developments could enhance, paralyze, hinder, undo, support, and/or make obsolete their organizational work. However, since scenarios are not predictions, scenarios are not games “to win.” They are more like pregame warmups—stretching exercises—for the sake of enhancing adaptability and agility for the real thing. Here is a simplified process for scenario development.

Identify the Driving Forces of Change

Our environments are rich with fads and trends, the former dying out quickly with little impact and the latter showing up earlier than anyone routinely observes, lasting beyond their significance, and ultimately having the potential to converge as forces that change our world. These trends can generally be categorized into the five STEEP macro-environmental domains. The higher a trend’s impact-probability mix is, the more closely it needs to be monitored, and the more central role it needs to play in our set of scenarios. Note: in Figure 5.1, the “zone of significant concern” below is not located further left, because the probabilities become too low to justify consideration while trend tracking bears out other concerns (i.e., evidence is too difficult to come by, which is why these surprise us), and it is not further right since current strategies already account for known high-probability trends. Finally, low-impact areas are important, but not of strategic concern.

Figure 5.1 Impact probability diagram

Highlight Critical Uncertainties

While scenarios can be prepared in a number of different ways, for our purposes we utilize the axes of uncertainty method as follows:

1. Group clusters of related, documented trends according to perceived patterns. Use these to visualize driving forces.
2. Identify two high-impact clusters with competing trends, which could drive the future one way or the other. Such suggests the forces are highly sensitive and reciprocally responsive.
3. Plot these two high-impact, uncertain force clusters as polar continuums (i.e., low–high, poor–rich, big–small, fast–slow, happy–sad)
4. Create a four-quadrant grid by superimposing one of the continuums perpendicular to the other (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 Four-quadrant scenario space

Map Plausible Scenarios

These resultant quadrants are scenario spaces, building upon the logic of our combined critical uncertainties. Note that scenario-crafting is a skill. Not all scenarios are useful. Good scenario sets entail: (1) the robust ability to provide insights for decisions under review, (2) realistically possible futures, (3) the maintenance of some probability for each scenario,

(4) logically consistent emergence for the scenarios, (5) qualitative difference between scenarios, (6) memorability of scenario diversity, and (7) a strong challenge to organizational assumptions.

Choose Strategic Issues to Stress

Finally, the goal of scenario-crafting is to stress test the organization’s current or intended strategy against the scenarios and the dilemma’s and windfalls they present. The ultimate aim, as mentioned earlier, is not to win the scenario. Instead, like stretching, stress testing with scenarios is a way to maintain your strategic agility as a health care organization. It helps you to think quickly about contingencies and stretches your creative capacity to interpret widely varying events.

Futures Wheels

The futures wheel (Figure 5.3) is a tool for organizing how you think about the future, and it provides you with a way to ask questions about the future and construct useful answers. Perhaps you have seen web-like diagrams before. This tool will share some of the characteristics of brainstorming tools like mind maps and spider diagrams, but it has a unique foresight use, and that pertains to modeling systemic consequences— systemic, meaning that a single cause has more than a single effect. This tool helps reveal the complex interrelationships that lead to our futures, and prompts future consciousness in the operational and strategic work of health care. You start by, as a team, agreeing unanimously on a potential impact. Then, you choose three STEEP domains for considering the impact. That is followed by brainstorming to agreement on three consequences from the initial impact, one for each domain. That process repeats for the subsequent domains, as each consequence from the initial impact now functions as an initial impact for even farther-reaching consequences. From the activity, you can discuss the length of time that would necessarily take place between impacts and consequences, whether patterns emerge from the changes, how difficult it is to creatively imagine consequences in various domains, and how consequences reflect the assumptions undergirding our judgments rather than causal relationships.

Figure 5.3 Futures wheel

Summary

Here is another way of thinking about strategic foresight, the interpretation, and translation force behind strategic thinking and the anticipatory leadership that promotes it: Strategic foresight, being a metaphoric competency, a hermeneutic process, is raw strategy’s insurance policy, its hedge. Moreover, Cornish notes, “foresight enables us to anticipate many of the risks and opportunities that could confront us in the future, giving us the time to decide what to do before we crash into them.”¹⁰ Of course, this kind of description might lead one to think that foresight is strategic management itself, but it is not. It is a component of strategic thinking. However, in broad terms, strategy formulates the organization’s direction, while foresight monitors the enterprise’s current and possible future operating conditions. Thus, strategic foresight merges well with strategy work, but it is broader and more inquisitive when compared to strategy’s more declarative nature. In watercraft terms, strategy attends to the vessel’s navigation capabilities (motor, rotor, computers, hull, and so on), whereas foresight observes, records, and postulates upon how the seas interact with (thwarting, forcing, and ignoring), and could interact with, the vessel. One might ultimately call foresight the skill of consideration, the entertainment of possibilities for the sake of present situation enhancement. It is the satellite and radar technology that integrates with the ship’s mapping systems and the captain’s know-how and route intentions for the sake of contingency planning. Thus, the leadership practices leveraging strategic foresight are anticipatory. It is inquiring now as to what may come next, comparing that data against regular cycles of change and development, and generating various interpretations of the results. Such leaders are not trying to predict the future—as that would be reckless since it is impossible—but they are trying to prepare for it. Thus, the interpretations they generate, often in the form of scenarios, are varied in order to provide paradigm-busting visions for their organizations’ and industries’ strategy teams. In the next section related to strategic leadership, the leadership process—as it pertains specially to innovation—encounters strategic planning. And, planners without a robust comprehension of the futures’ zigs and zags will likely run into a ditch, not having developed the necessary strategic agility that the practice of anticipatory leadership cultivates.

¹ Philipson, T.J., and K. Hult. April 3, 2015. “Should Investors Pay Attention to the Alleged Productivity Crises in Pharma?” In American Enterprise Institute, http://aei.org/publication/should-investors-pay-attention-to-the-alleged-productivity-crises-in-pharma/ (accessed on March 27, 2019).

² Hines, A., and P. Bishop, eds. 2006. Thinking About The Future: Guidelines For Strategic Foresight. Washington: Social Technologies, LLC.

³ Thoms, P., and D.B. Greenberger. 1995. “The Relationship between Leadership and Time Orientation.” Journal of Management Inquiry 4, no. 3, 272–292. Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed on March 14, 2019).

⁴ Ibid., 277.

⁵ Thoms, P., and D.B. Greenberger. 1995. “The Relationship between Leadership and Time Orientation.” Journal of Management Inquiry 4, no. 3, 272–292. Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed on March 14, 2019).

⁶ Zimbardo, P.G., and J.N. Boyd. 1999. “Putting Time in Perspective: A Valid, Reliable Individual-Differences Metric.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6, pp. 1271–1288.

⁷ Miller, R. 2011. “Being without Existing: The Futures Community at a Turning Point? A Comment.” Foresight 13, no. 4, 24–34. EconLit with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed on July 8, 2018).

⁸ Ibid, 29.

⁹ Vago, S. 2004. Social Change, 49–79, 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

¹⁰ Cornish, E. 2004. Futuring: The Exploration of the Future, xi. Bethesda, MD: World Future Society.