It seems as if business is getting harder, doesn’t it? You have to make more decisions, and you have less time to research them. You have a sinking feeling that you’re gradually falling farther and farther behind your daily battle with your e-mail and voice messages. And it’s harder to reach your clients and suppliers to discuss things with them, which means it takes longer to get the information you need to transact business.
Meanwhile, the complexity of daily life is steadily rising. It seems as if new factors, including the economic effects of terrorism, activity in the currency and stock markets, trade disputes between the United States and Europe or China, and the steady drumbeat of changes emerging from new technologies, are intruding on your decisions where they were largely irrelevant before. You have more information at your fingertips, but somehow that makes things worse, not better, especially when something goes wrong and it turns out you had the crucial piece of information in front of you all along, but never realized it.
How do we cope with chaos? How do we navigate the rocks and shoals in the ever-accelerating rapids of the data stream?
Well, part of the problem is that this has crept up on us, bit by bit, rather than all at once. As a result, we tend to consider the way we conduct business in too narrow a perspective. Consider your daily struggles with e-mail. You may spend an hour or more a day just clearing out spam and, in the process, wind up deleting valuable e-mails you should have read. And, once you’re past the spam, your time is further soaked up with the sheer volume of e-mails from people with whom you work.
There was a time when you spent no time at all on e-mail, when you didn’t even have an e-mail account. And when you actually opened your spam, you were almost excited that you had received something. Now consider that your volume of e-mail, spam and kosher alike, is going to get worse – much worse. What will you do when you come into the office and have 10 times as much spam, and five times as many genuine e-mails? Clearly you can’t spend 10 hours clearing out spam, and five times as long dealing with real messages – so what will you do?
First, you will have to have a defense against spam, and one that works. Which means you should spend part of your time now finding today’s most effective defenses, such as the 'respond and verify' software now appearing, like ChoiceMail from digiportal.com. When an e-mail message arrives from an unknown source (i.e., one that hasn’t been accepted before), you never see it. Instead, the software sends an e-mail back, asking the sender to verify, for the first time only, that this is a legitimate piece of e-mail, and not spam. Spamming software won’t reply, but a real personprobably will. Once the reply is received, the filter passes the original message through, and authorizes future messages from this source (unless you veto it).
The point is not that this is the last word on spam-killers, because it isn’t. The point is that you cannot manage spam by deleting it – you must take more active measures, because spam is going to continue to get worse before it gets better. (It will eventually go away, but not soon.)
Likewise, you can’t deal with the rising tide of legitimate messages, voice or e-mail, just by working longer hours or skipping lunch. Sooner or later you’re going to find you can’t cope at all. And the same is true of the rising tide of information. So, if you eventually won’t be able to cope, what should you be planning now to do then?
The obvious answer is that you need to set priorities, and deal with the most important things first, delegating or ignoring those you cannot cope with. There are two immediate reactions to this. Your first reaction is likely to be that it’s all important. If that’s true, it’s also true that some of it is more important than the rest – don’t let the immediate make you lose sight of the important. And secondly, if it’s all important, and you can’t handle it all, then your organization should delegate someone else to help get it done, because eventually anyone will fail with a constantly rising workload. Both insights tend to lead to a re-assessment of how important things really are.
Everyone knows about setting priorities, but…
But isn’t setting priorities really old stuff, and doesn’t everyone know about it? True, but that doesn’t mean everyone practices it, which is more important than knowing it. Plus, accepting that you need priorities also begs the question: how do you set priorities? Setting priorities is not something that should be done on the fly, but must be considered and placed in context. It means taking a structured, thoughtful look at where you are, what’s likely to happen to both your organization and the market you are serving. Then you need to decide where you will need to be in, say, five years’ time, and figure out how you can best get from where you are to there.
Clearly, making the decisions that allow you to set priorities, which in turn allow you to do the most important things, which allows you to cope with the steadily rising tide of information, is the most important part of what you do. Yet, less time is spent on this than is spent on deleting spam. Clearly, when you spend more time taking out the garbage than preparing your future, you’ve got the emphasis wrong. Even many organizations that are truly forward-thinking will organize a major planning session, take everyone off-site, and spend a whole *weekend* doing strategic thinking and planning. This is, say, 20 hours of thinking out of roughly 1,800 working hours a year, compared with, for instance, 7 hours of spam-fighting a week (300-350 hours a year).
The first decision in portfolio management
In the investment business, where I got my analytical training in thinking about the future, the first decision a portfolio manager makes is what kinds of investments he or she will not consider, because there are too many varieties of investments to perform serious research on all of them. Hence, a portfolio manager may decide that she won’t ever invest in pork bellies, orange juice futures, or other commodities; Malaysian, Vietnamese, or Thai stocks; British government perpetual bonds; and so on. Once she’s got the list down to a manageable universe, she can then start to do a legitimate job of researching the best choices.
Likewise, to begin coping with chaos, you need to decide which decisions you will make and which you will avoid, what varieties of information you will ignore, and who you will refuse to communicate with.
Next, you need to know the context of your work and your decisions. This means having a clear idea of where you want to go and how you want to get there. With that in mind, it becomes easier to identify what’s truly important, and what’s merely interesting. It also makes complex decisions easier, for if you have created a mental image or model of how you want things to work out, then you get as much information about a decision from assessing the context as you do the elements of the decision itself. Hence, you look at not just whether this choice is better than that choice, but also what the costs of making the wrong choice will be, how this decision closes off options or retains flexibility, and how it’s likely to affect your resources, the rest of your organization, and your clients.
Now, there are a number of different strategic planning tools that can help you define context, clarify your objectives, and plot a planned direction, but one of the most flexible that I’ve found is scenario planning. Scenario planning is another one of those things that everyone knows about, but few people ever actually use. Partly that’s because it takes time (and that’s what you’re short of, remember?), and partly that’s because people tend to believe that because they know about a given tool, they therefore don’t have to actually use it, even though they intellectually know that’s not true.
Scenario planning overcomes what are probably the two biggest mistakes people make when they think about, or plan for the future: it gives them specific, gritty detail; plus a range of outcomes based on carefully selected choices, rather than a single, simple answer hurriedly derived from nebulous assumptions.
You can’t think about the future in vague terms
You cannot get much value in thinking about the future if you think in vague generalities. For example, try answering the question: 'What will happen in the future?' and see how far you get. Instead, a far more useful question about the future might be 'How might Voice Over IP (Internet telephony) affect our costs and the way we manage communications with our clients and suppliers?' allows you to think through very specific aspects of your business and your marketplace. Thinking about the future is much easier and more profitable if you think in specific terms, and the more specific the questions you ask, the easier it is to come up with useful answers, and identify the things you need to research. Scenario planning allows you to divide the future up into clearly defined pieces, and then ask detailed questions about each one. This helps give definition to your expectations, and to substantiate your hopes or fears.
Meanwhile, scenario planning specifically contemplates a wide range of possible futures, rather than expecting only one outcome. Some deride this as 'On the other hand…' thinking, but the purpose is not to guess the actual future through sheer mental power and brilliance, but to prepare for the uncertainty that is the most overwhelming likelihood of all of our tomorrows.
There’s a story of a famous general – probably apocryphal – who was renowned for his meticulous planning of all the details of a coming battle, down to number of cans of beans his troops would need. A reporter, interviewing the general, asked him, 'Sir, is it true that you plan every battle in exhaustive detail?'
'That’s correct,' snapped the general.
'But I understand that military thinkers believe that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Is that right?'
'Absolutely true,' replied the general.
'Then sir, if no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, why do you waste so much time on detailed planning?'
'Because,' answered the general, 'it allows me to improvise with greater intelligence.'
The future is not going to be the way you expect it to be. The past few years have underlined that the unexpected will catch us by surprise. If you want to be prepared for an uncertain tomorrow, cope with the rising tide amount of information and the increasingly complex decisions coming at you, then you need to be able to improvise with increasing intelligence. To do otherwise will lead to being crushed by chaos.
Richard’s recent book, Who Owns Tomorrow? deals with these issues, and much more, in greater detail.
© Copyright, IF Research, November 2003.
by futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A.
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