Boy Oh Boy, Can School Districts Use A Dose Of “Strategic Foresight”

“What Companies that Excel at Strategic Foresight Do Differently is a very interesting article in the Harvard Business Review. It basically says that unsuccessful companies are often in a reactive mode instead of forwardly identifying potential “unknowns” that could be threats or opportunities. Pretty easy to substitute “school districts” for “companies,” isn’t it? And when school districts try to break out of being in a reactive mode, they often create “new initiatives” that come out of the heads of district leadership absent much outreach or research. It’s worth reading the entire article, but here’s a short excerpt highlighting what I think are its most important points: As company leaders begin the New Year, a simple retrospective can reveal what stands between your team and foresight leadership. Start with a single episode. Recall a recent change in your operating environment that your organization did not anticipate. Looking back, what signals might have preceded the change? What do you wish you had been tracking? Maybe you had all the data, but somehow it wasn’t translated into the right strategic moves. What moves do you wish your organization had made? Learn from what you’ve missed. Repeated failures of future detection often point to gaps in foresight. Check your organizational attitudes. Not all failures of foresight stem from a gap in foresight routine. For foresight to drive strategy, the right organizational attitudes must be in place. Consider what you and senior leaders around you focus on: Are you continually stuck in a cycle of short-term reaction to the perceived threat of the moment, or are you able to focus on hunting for upside amid uncertainty? Is intuition taking a front seat to quantitative approaches? I’m adding this info to The Best Resources On The Importance Of Knowing What You Don’t Know .

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