Too many businesses put themselves in jeopardy by giving all their attention to today’s problems and opportunities. Their future goes wanting.

Every organization needs foresight to survive. But too many submerge their occasional futures thoughts under overwhelming concern for the problems of the present. Foresight in organizations is typically focused narrowly on a vision of the preferred future, or on fears about what is directly affecting the organization’s business.

People in organizations are experts, rewarded for their knowledge and how they perform in their area of specialty. That too can shut out broader thinking and speculative exploration of change and what it means.

At a workshop a few years ago, an executive in a big chemicals and materials firm reacted to a wide ranging discussion of important trends. He said: “I don’t see what this has to do with fluoropolymers.” He was doing his job the best way he knew how. He evaluated things according to their impact on his responsibility—in fact on his company’s current market, customers, and applications for fluoropolymers. His posture and voice said that it would be hard for me and my colleagues to move him off that position.

Fortunately for us, the fluoropolymer skeptic got an earful from his colleagues, people outside his area of responsibility. They showed him a dozen ways that what he was hearing about social, technological, political, and economic change around the world would shape the challenges and opportunities for his product.

Business faces all kinds of change which has meaning that may not be immediately clear and may not seem directly relevant to current operations and issues. But it is relevant. With the rapid pace of change and the complexity of our world, it is probably more essential than every to make connections between the business at hand and disparate insights and information about the future.

Businesses need to think in the broader context that foresight brings them. They need to at once think more deeply into the future—five to fifteen years out—and to explore a broader range of change surrounding them.

Foresight should be a part of organizational strategy making, product development, R&D planning, human resources planning, facilities planning, etc.

There are dozens of techniques for getting foresight into organizational thinking. You can research futures studies for information on those tools. At their core are the following outcomes, which you can strive for as you help guide your organization:

·        Get colleagues to surface and share their assumptions about the future.

·        Open up thinking to the wider (often) global context in which the organization’s destiny will unfold.

·        Look at how different forces and trends interact, rather than just exploring the meaning of some single, dominant trend.

·        Share knowledge about change more thoroughly throughout the organization.

·        Explore change more deeply, and share ideas about change with more people in the organization.

·        Engage outside experts and stakeholders in exploring the organization’s future: you can invent your future with your customers help, in fact.

·        Preserve an understanding that there are multiple possible outcomes for the organization’s future, and that the organization should be prepared for that range and agile enough to maneuver in the face of change.

·        Involve more people in futures thinking and strategy making, to tap a wider sweep of knowledge and to bring more people into the conversation about change that will shape the organization’s strategy.

Build these goals into your work by making foresight a regular habit, not just an occasional activity. If you do, you can anticipate change and be ready to respond to it more nimbly, and almost certainly less expensively. How many times has your organization’s budget absorbed the shock of making a change much later and more expensively that might have been possible? 

Image: Kaiban, via Flickr, cc license

The word curation is turning up in new contexts, especially related to online information, where a phrase appears often: content curation. And more people are recognizing the value and power of curation over creation. This emerging idea offers a new perspective on the future of news in two ways. First, it helps broaden the definition of news and news editing by offering an idea that embraces collecting, overseeing, filtering, and linking to content of any sort. Second, it offers a solution for the as yet weakly-governed and filtered world of online information.  

We are familiar with what a museum curator is. In part, they select and share what the museum displays, but they also work to identify, interpret, and protect the museum’s holdings. The recent focus on curation draws on this understanding of the word, but puts it in a new context. The curator of information on a website, or the curator of a conference, is the one who makes decisions about what to show, how to organize things, and so on.

So curation implies a service, like that of the editor of a journal, newsletter, or newspaper, who selects and evaluates information before it goes to the reader. That is generally a positive thing, and when you choose an information source, you are choosing, implicitly, an editor or editorial system you trust.

But in the past year or two, there have been more discussions of curation as, in effect, censorship. For example, with the arrival of Apple’s iPad came discussions of how the company is vetting each downloadable iPad app for its worthiness—instead of an open source system where anyone can create an application for a device, Apple is “curating” the app selection it sells via its online app store. So in this case we have “curated computing” and not everyone is happy about it.

At least one new internet place, CurationNation.org, is curation-positive. It aims to be “a web site devoted to the exploration of the concept of curation – and its increasing impact on content, context, and publishing.”

Steve Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net, a video publishing platform says: “For website content publishers and content creators, there’s a debate raging as to the rights and wrongs of curation. While content aggregation has been around for a while with sites using algorithms to find and link to content, the relatively new practice of editorial curation — human filtering and organizing — has created what I’m dubbing, ‘The Great Creationism Debate.’” See more of his thoughts here. Interestingly, we’ve come full circle. We’ve recognized that the wild and open internet needs the steady hands of editors to help us readers/viewers manage all its offerings. But there's continued debate, because we really don't know how we want to do this work, and who should, and what the equivalent of journalistic ethics are in content curation.

Curation can be a positive response to too much information, especially related to online consumption of information. It recognizes that we are looking for ways to navigate the world of information, and are ready and willing to rely on others to help us do it. Curation is being crowd-sourced—we are relying on large numbers of people to identify interesting things, and show us their relative importance by voting, “liking” them on FaceBook, Buzzing them up, Tweeting and reTweeting about them, and so on.

Social networks have taken up another role in this too. By friending a certain group of people, we hope to hear about things that matter to us, and avoid hearing what the general population—but not our circle—might want to know about. That’s why, for example, across the several hundred people I follow on Twitter, and the dozens I have friended on Facebook, I have never seen a single mention of Justin Bieber, the teen pop star who has regularly dominated Twitter, according to Twitter’s “trending” mechanism. By my selective following of people on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve narrowed the range of information and ideas I will see in a routine way. That gives me an element of curation in my Twitter and Facebook consumption.

We have a lot more to figure out about how to do this well, and what it all means. The new focus on curation is reviving or perhaps mirroring a lot of the debates and long-established ethical perspectives on journalism and editing in the print and other media. What’s different? For one thing, we are all (potentially) curators. Instead of a few grizzled old journalists who paid their dues working up the hierarchy at a newspaper, through social networks and the Internet, millions of people are making the “editorial” choices: what’s linked, what’s not, what’s shared, what’s not. Everyone, to some extent, is a news editor now.

So far so good, but we’re nowhere near finished figuring out what we need to make sense and get value from the abundance of information available to us. Much more to come ….

Earlier posts on the future of news:

The future of news 1: We need better foresight

The future of news 2: what are the big uncertainties?

There's a new special feature page here, "13 mistakes you make when exploring the future". It comes from lessons I've learned and learned from my clients in 23+ years exploring the future. Please let me know what you think, you can share your insights in the comments.

The participants in a futures activity—for the activity to be successful—have to do several things. First they must shed their immediate concerns and responsibilities. I once saw an extreme case of the inability to do this at an event in a materials and chemicals firm. An R&D executive, during a discussion exploring issues and problems in society said: “I don’t see what this has to do with fluoropolymers.” His colleagues—many who did not have fluoropolymer responsibilities—jumped all over him and showed him how he needed to think first about how the world and the marketplace were changing, then find a fit with the company’s technologies.

Second, they must suspend their devotion to what their organization does today and allow the future to suggest possibilities that may change the opportunities available to the organization. At a futures conference, one speaker put it succinctly: “We are up to our eyeballs in petroleum—let’s not try to be something we are not.” Yet that firm has myriad opportunities in energy beyond petroleum, and given the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, had better drop such close focus the existing basis of the business.

And they must, in the case of large businesses, set aside their concerns about how the Wall Street analysts and investors will respond to changes they might make. This is a particularly acute problem for Fortune 500 firms. Shares in those firms are defined and planned components of investment portfolios. If a firm is to transform itself to something new—in other words if the changes it wants to make are substantial—shareholders and stock analysts will react. A blue chip firm feels stuck in that status. How much wiggle room there is depends on the myriad ingredients of Wall Street thinking, on the current investment climate, and on the reputation of the firm and its leaders.

A university soccer player’s reprehensible fouling becomes an instant Youtube hit. Reality show villains are the topic of “did you see…” discussions the next day at workplaces all over. The actions of ball players and politicians, pop stars and actors, on and off stage or field or legislative floor, become the stuff of moral outrage. They also become the stuff of moral lessons: for adults and for children.

Sorry, no, not offering free samples! (Though you can always lure me in to sharing thoughts on the future with you). But I can share tips on getting deeper thinking and scouting on the future going, costing you only some time, and less of that than you would spend otherwise.

As information consumers we have a growing problem. Our marvelous technology—and it is truly marvelous—is too good at only feeding us the information we want to consume. Even as we have 24/7 access to whatever information we want, we also have the tools to make what we see precisely, and narrowly, what we want to see, and nothing more. But that's terrible environmental scanning (the process we use to really keep up with what's going on).

Over the past couple years, I’ve written about different aspects of foresight from a practical point of view, with the goal of helping organizations become more foresightful. The idea that led to the name for this blog is that it’s critical to have a “Foresight Culture” for success in a complex, changing world.

1. Open conversation and sharing of ideas is routine, with people contributing ideas and insights in, but also outside of their areas of responsibility and expertise.
2. More than a few people on the staff have a habit of looking for new ideas and information, not just in their field and areas of focus, but beyond them as well. We can this environmental scanning, but the most important thing about it is to make it natural, not just an organizational function or procedure. Going with this are habits of, and practice in, converting what you find into insights, and sharing them. There is some advice on environmental scanning here, and thoughts on sharing insights here.
3. A sense of a wider system – in a foresight culture, people’s thinking is not limited to the sector, technology area, market niche, region, etc. where they operate. They are ready to discover something new from outside the normal realm in which they play.
4. A sense of the future (beyond 3^rd quarter this year, e.g.). this is critical to move the organization from a reactive one to a proactive one. Successful organizations think several steps ahead, and multiple years ahead—they know where they want to be in 10 or 20 years, and perhaps beyond.
5. An understanding of alternative futures—namely, that there is a range of possibility in the future that we face, that we can shape some of it, but we cannot know, with certainty, what will happen. With this in mind, organizations with a foresight culture work to be prepared for a variety of outcomes, and key their view focused on what’s happening around them, to see at any time, which direction things are moving in.
6. A sense of empowerment, not helplessness. This goes with the longer-term view—the sense of the future. By contrast, lacking a foresight culture can mean suffering from what psychologist Martin Seligman calls learned helplessness. It yields a fatalism and makes organizations wait to see what will happen, rather than taking a hand in shaping their destinies.