“Foresensing”–The Key to Evergreen

In the days before texting I had friends, who even after email had become common via mobile devices, would always call or leave a voice mail message when they needed something or had a question.

It typically involved a document or some research finding.  So I would fulfill the requests quickly via email to leave a paper trail, but these individuals would invariably call again for clarification.

That is unless they disagreed with the information I had sent or something our organization was doing predicated on the findings, in which case they would write a lengthy email neglecting to include the background and copy a trillion other people, now understood as a cardinal sin.

Boy, I sure miss that drama.  But don’t jump to the conclusion that they had a learning or reading disability.

People who did that may have been much more strategic and savvy than it seems.  They probably accepted something I, too, understood at the time but chose not to further enable:

1. Many people no longer read;  2. Even more prefer to shape decisions and opinions on anecdotes and personalities rather than data and information; and 3. Very few are paying attention to the future or evolving.

In community work, like business and government, the world is awash with dead or dying organizational models which are kept on life support by people either addicted to those behaviors or overly conscious of those still all-too-prevalent conditions.

This is why “best practices” are so easy to spot, not merely for purposes of copying, but because the organizations that exhibit them are purposely wired for what entrepreneurial researcher Dr. Joseph Pistrui calls “nextsensing.”

During my now-concluded career in community destination marketing to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development in four different parts of the country, I was what some would now characterize as an “evergreen entrepreneur.”

Only, I was on the quasi-public-private side of things. Still, according to some, I exhibited all 7 characteristics of evergreen entrepreneurs to some extent in the five different startups with which I was involved and/or led.

I enjoyed startups because you not only get to build an organization from scratch but you get to evolve each one by quantum leaps each time.  During the last half of my career, I learned to do this every few months with the same organization.

Nextsensing doesn’t come from “group-think” exercises such as brainstorming which, as studies have shown, is a pure waste of time unless accompanied with a very healthy dose of critical thinking.

Unfortunately, most people who facilitate or are drawn to the “kumbaya” school of brainstorming seem averse to thinking at all, let alone critically, because to them, asking questions is criticism.

But this is only one of the reasons that the traditional approach to making strategic plans is often futile, or when successful, are destined to be quickly relegated to a dusty shelf (buried on a rarely seen portion of a computer drive.)

An even more compelling reason these plans are now ineffective is that true strategic insight, strategic foresight or “nextsensing,” must be woven into the DNA of an organization in such a way that it occurs organically in real time.

Writing about this aspect in a classic book entitled, The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business, author and researcher Arie de Geus famously wrote “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be your only sustainable advantage.”

Earlier, in 1988, de Geus termed this as “institutional learning” in an article in Harvard Business Review.  He explained that this type of learning is much more difficult than individual learning.

Organizations that are “evergreen” outperform those that are focused only on near-term returns.  According to studies, de Geus explains that they “institutionalize change” rather than reacting to crisis.

In the past, even evolving organizations could afford to gestate learning anywhere from 12 to 18 months before acting on it.

Today, that evolution must be in real time.

Researchers involved with the Nextsensing Project have identified four skills needed to see the future in real time:

1. Stretch Sensibilities – A mindset and commitment to exploration.
2. Stand for Change – Set new directions and adjust priorities.
3. Create a new Order – Retool the enterprise to set new goals and trigger actions no one else has set or achieved.
4. Lead with “Foresense” – Transform hunch to vision and new skills.

In late 1970s, Bert Lance, a banker and native-Georgian who headed the Office of Budget and Management for then President Jimmy Carter popularized the expression, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” an old Swedish proverb.

No even remotely sustainable organization has that luxury today.

A Tactical Importance of Strategic Mindset

You would think from the news that people are complaining a lot about having the option of checking mobile devices during leisure trips.

But research (see full study) shows that of the 88% of travelers worldwide who take mobile devices along on leisure trips, six-in-10 use them once a day and only 22% for work-related, e.g. checking emails.

Among American leisure travelers, nearly five times that use is for staying  in touch with family or friends or to take photographs or videos.

The top two travel apps are GPS/Google Maps and those created for communities by destination marketing organizations (DMOs) such as the three which I led during my career.

Other research suggests that those who complain about technological access may actually have trouble thinking strategically.

So they cover it up with hyperactivity and then humblebrag about it, to use a term coined by author, comedian and TV producer author Harris Wittels.

It is a form of false modesty that author Greg McKeown applies to people who complain about being harried as a “sort of back-door-way to brag about being busy,” code for “being successful and important.”

In another of his insightful books entitled, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” his research makes the case that paradoxically, people who complain/brag like this have trouble deciding what is important at work and at leisure.

It isn’t about IQ though.

Roger Martin, a researcher in strategy-making at the Martin Property Institute finds that smarter people often struggle at being strategic because they get caught up in making the “right” choice rather than just the “best” possible choice.

Working now less than we did in the 1960s and 1980s, unless you are working single mother, Americans on average can’t complain of being overworked.

Maybe it just seems like we are because newsrooms seem drawn to anecdotes, perhaps heard there first.  Humblebrags lead to especially juicy anecdotes.

For people with a strategic mindset, having access to mobile technology on a leisure trip provides peace of mind and enables deeper relaxation.

It is about trade-offs because they know they won’t be holding co-workers up waiting for something simple, and also because they can nip issues in the bud before they fester.

The secret is the related skill of focus, more specifically, the ability to quickly refocus back on leisure (they can also take power naps.)

Those who can’t do this on a leisure trip probably aren’t able to at work either.

Even people who complain about technological access probably don’t when it permits them to soften the distinctions between work and leisure time, e.g. attending their kid’s school-related events.

They might also suffer from an odd definition of leisure, placing it in perpetual tension with work.

These are the folks who drain every second of vacation time and usually return exhausted from working so hard at it.

According to Dr. Ken Matos at the Families and Work Institute, a better definition of leisure is actually being able to “do what you want, when you want to do it,” including perhaps switching on and off more frequent “10-second” vacations during the workday.

“Mental flexibility,” including the ability to shed distractions and/or immediately refocus back on tasks, is one of the three pivotal “executive function” skills we begin to learn between ages 3 and 5.

They are the scaffolding for learning skills such as focus, planning, prioritizing, scheduling, anticipating, deciding and analyzing according to Dr. Edward M. Hollowell, the author of Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People.

Studies show that focus, in particular, is a better predictor of both health and success than IQ or background.

We continue to hone “executive function” skills at home and in school well into adolescence.

Adults who haven’t mastered them find themselves ill-equipped for the workplace. But while more difficult, it is possible to hone them even then through diligent exercise.

However, lacking them isn’t just about coming from a disadvantaged background.

In my four-decades as an executive I was always puzzled when I came across high performers who lacked one or more of these skills even though they came from secure homes and earned good grades through college.

Giveaways signs were a low tolerance for uncertainty or complaining about finding too many emails waiting for them on Monday morning or being aggravated at having to change or shift gears throughout the day.

Trying to kid them out of their angst by asking if they would rather find an old-fashioned inbox full of paper memos and yellow sticky notes dated me and went right over their heads.

When that didn’t work I would try to teach them how to quickly and strategically triage emails before closing them by either taking them as an FYI and deleting, quickly answering before deleting, delegating them, or tracing for follow up as a project.

Overload is usually a sign someone is postponing this triage while repeatedly opening and closing the same emails.

It is also an indication that someone probably isn’t protecting or spacing their calendar from all but two meetings per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Frustrated, I would often mistakenly resort to trying to breathe fire or a sense of urgency into them or by just trying even harder to show by example what seemed easy to me.

But I realize now these otherwise high performers didn’t just struggle with the discipline we all do to minimize on average the 75% of all distractions in every workplace that are self-interruptions.

It also wasn’t enough that we worked according to a “best practice” strategic plan, nimble enough to be organically tweaked each time new or better analytics became available.

More than lacking in strategic mindset, these otherwise high performers may have just needed more time to think.

Knowing what I know now, I could have instituted one of the hundreds of gems in McKeown’s new book including one attributed to Frank O’Brien, the founder of a 50 or so person marketing organization called Conversation:

A once-a-month, day-long, full-staff unstructured “think day.”

Known for organizational strategy, I had one glaring weakness.

To appease community interests who were lagging behind, when we would calibrate differentiation for the community based on newer or truer analytics, I would sometimes try to straddle strategies, a term coined by Dr. Michael Porter.

It works for investments just not organizations (especially community organizations.)  It “forces us to make sacrifices on the margins” warns McKeown, hardest in my experience on high performers.

That was often accompanied by another mistake, trying to take the pressure off high performers by filling vacancies way to fast.

Not until the last decade of my career did I find and adopt a much tighter selection process and begin to “hire slow and fire fast.”

Consultant David Camner showed me that a vacancy or two is far less costly than a poor hire.

As former Apple-evangelist Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start intimates, poor hires attract more poor hires who weigh high performers down, even resulting in a “Bozo explosion” and the need to clean house.

I’ve known some private organizations with incredibly narrow missions that work without plans of any type, not even job descriptions.  Based on what we know now, that was a faulty notion that strategy-making was passe.

Today, having a strategic mindset and hands on analytics are the foremost “must-haves” for executives, even more important than creativity for marketing execs.

In part, McKeown’s book takes many of the strategy-making principles in a book on organizational strategy by Dr. Porter that I read in Anchorage in the mid-1980s and referred to incessantly while differentiating Durham during my final stint down to the the individual  level.

Whether organizational or individual day-to-day, strategy-making is all about “…making choices, trade-offs.”

Technology is not really the problem.

Listening Past My “B.S.– O–Meter”

Forming strategic partnerships was something at which I became pretty good during the latter half of my now-concluded 40-year career in community-destination marketing, or so I was told.

But I had to try very hard to compensate for a blind spot.  Like most deficits that people have, it was due, in part, to a strength.  I have always had what I like to call a very well-calibrated “B.S.-O- Meter.”

I remember trying to collaborate with two colleagues many years ago.  They would meet before hand and come up proposals for my cooperation and then present them to me as though they were “up for discussion.”  They weren’t.

Unfortunately, many of these proposals undermined the mission of the organization I led, but I still tried to sift through them for alternative ways to make things work.

One of these individuals would frequently interrupt me as I raised questions or concerns.  Thinking they were open to free-flowing discussion, I would begin to do the same, only to be lectured by the other person for “interrupting.”

It was frustrating that my best win-win counter-proposals would come to me only later as I turned these exchanges over in my mind looking for something that would work.

The problem, other than being offended at the double standard and being put on the spot by requests they knew were antithetical, was that I needed to be a much better listener.

While reading a newly published book entitled Real Influence, co-authored by two doctors, Mark Goulston an M.D and John Ullman a Ph.D. who teaches at UCLA, I recognized myself in a part of the book that deals with getting past a “blind spot.”

When my “B.S-o-Meter” was on full alert due to somebody’s “self-serving tactics and techniques,” I would often listen “at” them with my “defense up and preparing counterpoints.”

If I was being asked to do something antithetical and the B.S. was running particularly deep, I might even listen “over” the person, which I now know is far more of an insult than interrupting.

The authors of Real Influence have been graciously republishing summaries from the book on the Harvard Business Review blog.  A few weeks ago, when I read the one on listening it dawned on me that the intent I often attributed to those two friends was really due to the fact that they also had difficulty with listening.

They often missed what I was trying to repeatedly explain because they were either “listening over” or using what the authors describe as “problem-solving” listening, where instead of trying to truly understand, they just wanted to check things off the list.

It was a testament to our collective perseverance that the three of us were able to pull off several strategic partnerships.  However, the process was far more exhausting and far less fulfilling than my involvement in many other collaborations over the years.

I like what the authors call “listening of the highest order.” This is described as listening to “other people to discover what’s going on inside them.  It’s listening on their terms, not yours.  It’s understanding where people are coming from to establish genuine rapport.”

Introspection is something that comes easy to me.  Thanks to insights I glean from books and posts such as those authored by Drs. Goulston and Ullmen, even though now-concluded, my career is still teaching me a little bit more every day.

Who knows, maybe even my two long-ago colleagues are listening.

Lessons From Birth

It wasn’t clear I was going to make it during my first six months of life.

While I have no real memory, it’s all there in my wiring. Experts have identified this period and what I overcame at the beginning of life as the source of some of the traits that helped me succeed in my now-concluded nearly-four-decade career as a community/destination marketing exec.

But I’ve also had to learn to moderate the downside of those very same strengths.

I was conceived in October of 1947, more than a year after my Dad returned from Europe and got out of the U.S. Army. My parents had eloped three years earlier and my Mom had lived and worked off-base as Dad went through basic training at Camp Roberts near Paso Robles, California before shipping out to Europe.

After the separation of war, they were eager to start a family.

I was a bit overdue and born in 1948 in the midst of the hottest and busiest time of year on the 1200 acre cattle and horse ranch and related farmland that my paternal grandparents and great-grandparents had homesteaded and then assembled just a mile from the upper Henry’s Fork in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Eastern Idaho.

My Dad rushed my Mom 50 miles south to the nearest hospital in Idaho Falls on a very hot July afternoon in a 1949 Ford that had come out the month before. I was delivered before he could park the car and make it to the delivery room. The pregnancy was a surprise because specialists didn’t think it was possible for Mom to have children.

But my parents were very determined. I was followed by two sisters, each of us spaced three years apart but, sadly, they also suffered three miscarriages.

I got off to a great start, weighing more than 8 lbs. at delivery but it all went downhill from there. My immediate reaction over the first few months of life was to projectile vomit regardless of whether it was my Mom’s milk or any number of formulas including the “tried and true” Mead’s Dextri-Maltose, developed nearly forty years earlier in 1911.

I’m not talking about the usual baby spit-up but vomit that shoots out six or more feet in a gush, often showering my Dad or grandfather.

At three-months, older women on nearby ranches and farms worried that I wouldn’t make it much longer. I was barely gaining any weight and nothing would stay down and crying was non-stop. In early January, as I turned six months old, the ranch was buried in one of the huge blizzards common during the winter there, erasing every visible sign that any roads had ever existed.

But this blizzard was epic, even for that part of the country, drifts were high enough to bury some telephone poles and they completely blocking roads and even trains for a month.

My Dad went down in the cellar to get a can of powder formula and couldn’t find any, although my parents remembered stocking up the week before the storm. Desperate, they gave me some of the whole milk that we sold to the creamery in nearby Ashton along with the even more valuable cream when we separated a portion.

Whole cow’s milk was believed to be the worst thing possible to give any baby but especially with this condition.

The “miracle of the blizzard of 1949” has been recounted at nearly every family gathering I can remember. Once I drank the whole milk I stopped crying for the first time in six months and began to immediately gain weight. They found that formula, by the way, hiding in plain sight the next morning; but from then on, whole, incredibly rich, cow’s milk was the centerpiece of my diet.

I was fortunate enough to dodge most the negative side-effects that can result from what medical professionals term “faltering growth” or a half century earlier by the myth-enshrouded term “failure to thrive.”

But specialists, including management consultants, have credited that adversity with honing several traits that were conditioned by my parents, teachers and mentors into strengths that helped me succeed in my school work, in athletics and in my career.

I’m living proof, however, that each of those strengths could also be liabilities had I not learned from them and adapted.

Here are a handful:

• A passion for life and learning. My system had to kick-start so many times in those first few months that I have innately anticipated every day as though it would be my last. Life is not taken for granted. But I had to learn to moderate intensity.

• An indefatigable drive and resilience to achieve both short-term milestones and long term goals while overcoming setbacks or obstacles. I’ve had to learn to appreciate and work with people who move more slowly and appear less motivated.

• A hyper-vigilance that helps me see strategically and quickly identify threats which has been key to my work responsibilities. But I’ve had to learn that everything isn’t a matter of life or death and to be more trusting at one level and maybe a little less overall.

• An ability to tolerate a certain amount of ambiguity and inconsistency that probably comes from a pretty ambiguous first six months but opened my mind up to new data,fresh ideas, innovation and growth. But I’ve had to learn to listen carefully to those who harden positions without backup for both/and alternatives.

• An empathy for the underdog, the underprivileged, the disabled, the stigmatized and an intolerance for condescension, racism, sexism, misogynists and BMOCs. But I’ve had to learn not to tell myself stories and to listen beyond the messenger.

Of course, I’m grateful that I lived but I’m especially grateful for those who helped me condition the traits imbued by that early struggle into strengths.

In turn, I also appreciate what I learned from adapting and managing those strengths and I’m thankful for everyone who has been so tolerant and forgiving during this journey.

This bit of history may be of interest one day to my grandsons, who started 1st and 2nd grade yesterday and maybe their children or children’s children.

But I dedicate it to my Mom and Dad, just 19 and 24 years old at the time, who never gave up on me, even when covered in projectile vomit and sleepless through six months of constant crying.