Sometimes a blunt-force tool is best for grinding through the analysis and exploration of ideas.
The image at the right shows the basic concept, but let’s look a little closer at how to make this tool simple and useful.
In the basic grid you would relate, e.g. Item A to Item B, and Item B to Item A. But working the crosses two ways is hard. To do it more simply, just assume each pair interacts. Also, you don’t cross a thing with itself.
Thus in the stair-step cross impact diagram at the right, we work only in the unshaded cells. With this tool, you can explore emerging change to discover possible future outcomes.
Below is a filled-out example about the future consumer marketplace:
Where to use cross impacts
Cross impact is a back-shop or group-process tool. It is for exploration. Most of the time, nobody will want to see the gory details of your cross impact effort, though it is possible to tidy up and streamline the results for sharing with others.
What can you cross impact?
Cross impact analysis resource page
For more on cross impact analysis, see: LINK.
No matter the format used, the cross impact tool insists we acknowledge that nothing happens in a vacuum. That’s its real payoff. And the process of doing the analysis is its strongest benefit. Give it a try. Below is a link for a PDF of a template and instructions.
*This post gives a view of one of multiple approaches to cross impact analysis. The original form, invented by Ted Gordon and Olaf Helmer [LINK] is a quantitative method for assessing probabilities and/or the magnitude of impacts between different factors or decisions. My use is qualitative and is focused on discovery of potential future outcomes.
I had told her about co-authoring a book in the 1990s about the year 2025. [2025 : Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology] Holly’s question got me thinking about the purpose of my work.
It’s reasonable for people to expect futurists to predict the future. But accurate prediction is not the real value of our work. What futurists do is very much about today. Forecasts should show the range of and directions of change that get us started toward a desired future. The forecast endpoint is not the point.
There is little point in framing an idea about the future and then waiting ten or fifteen years to see “Did you get it right?” Today is where foresight has its power.
The best question I could ask when we get to 2025 is: Did people who read 2025 in the late 1990s act differently because of the ideas in the book?
Why did we write 2025? To help business people in the late 1990s understand change and potential for the future in that year. So my book, 2025, published in 1996, was for people in 1996 to understand future possibility.
As the year 2025 approaches, I still expect to be embarrassed about where we were wrong. Most often that will be about what we did not forecast at all and where we were too optimistic. But I should forget about it. That was not the point or the purpose of the book.
How should you think about this?
When you work with a futurist or engage with the future, know your today reasons. Allow the process to range imaginatively over future ideas. But don’t worry about certainty and accuracy at some future date. Explore what those ideas tell you about what to do now.
For some further thoughts on this, see What do futurists really do?
In organizations, knowing what’s going on today across the business landscape (”what is”), is essential. Too often the press of daily work keeps an executive from knowing enough.
But understanding how things are changing and the emerging challenges and opportunities in front of you (”what if”) needs attention too. Nearly always, the press of business and immediate demands shut down attention to “what if”.
Here is what is involved:
“What is” — the operating environment:
“What if” — the future:
For both, we can’t help but stand in today as we think and work to understand. But we must try to think forward to better anticipate the future.
“What is” functions poorly without “what if.” Taking action in response to conditions today, without thoughts toward the future, is risky. But the reverse is true too. You need to know enough about current conditions to fully explore potential change.
What to do about it
Broaden your view of “what is” by exploring the environment more broadly, beyond the specific marketplace niche, or issue, or geography you focus on.
Deepen your view of “what if” into the future by: Explicitly testing out ideas about 5 or 10 or more years from now. Ask the “what ifs” questions. Build stories (scenarios) of future possibilities. Draw implications of those “what ifs”. Attention to both questions will make you stronger and more limber as you face challenges and meet new opportunities.
For more insight on this and a related illustration, see: Management, strategy, and foresight, compared
Perhaps the biggest inhibitor of foresight for organizations is time. Even if your organization recognizes the power and value of exploring its future, the press of daily work and immediate needs squeezes away the time and energy you might give to exploring change.
You only have the time and resources you have. You have to find a way to fit in foresight. Below is advice based on how much time you expect to have. Certainly more is better, but you can optimize impact with some care and thought no matter the timing. As always, a savvy futurist can help to shape your efforts and help you guide them. And I am happy to chat about your situation whether or not you engage my help.
What to do if you only have….
An hour — you finally got time on leadership’s agenda, or it’s your turn for a brown bag lunch talk. You want to change minds, wake people to new ideas, energize thinking about the future, give foresight its due. This is hard!
Get right to it. Make it a conversation, seeded with distinct insights on change. Pose “what ifs” about what is central to the organization.
Have a conversation about the critical forces changing the organization’s destiny. That means surfacing everyone’s assumptions about the future, and helping them interpret the big changes that are at play in your business and your sector.
Do this: Prepare, prepare, prepare. An hour is not enough time for group discovery, which is valuable and powerful when there’s more time. It has to be a call to action around one or several (at most) critical changes you face that need focus. This hour should end with collective interest in more. If you have a hour with top leadership, it should lead to permission to deepen the exploration of the future in the organization, and more time.
A day — you have a little more time with a small group or a cross-functional team, and you have a mandate to explore something about the organization’s future.
Make the most of it! Make it quality time, preferably off site, to pare away distractions. Get everyone focused on exploring change and what it means to the organization. You have time to give participants a clear sense of coming change, and for them to take ownership of it, adding their ideas.
Do this: Do your homework beforehand. Develop a briefing or find a valid and meaningful, and short, body of ideas about the future of your interests, such as a list of critical forces or transformations in the sector. Use those as the basis for discussions.
If you can, invite people from different responsibilities in the organization. Think like a revolutionary. Your goal is to seed ideas and interest in confronting change and deepening the team’s foresight.
Hold people off from immediately “solving” the problems implied. Try to get their energy first on elaborating on potential change and its implications. End with a call to further action.
A week — You’ve secured teh team’s time for a week of futures exploration. A week is time to learn and strategize with a select group of folks. That has power since those involved can discover and interpret critical ideas about change. They can learn to talk about them and prepare to be missionaries across the organization.
Do this: Identify the best team you can for open-minded exploratory thinking. If you can get a cross-functional group involved, do it.
Shape expectations in the wider organization for what you are doing. Find people and experiences that will help your team understand more about the future and how to think about it. Visits to places where you can see leading edge change, and hearing from diverse thinkers will open up your thinking.
Ultimately, it’s hands-on shaping of futures ideas, and a focus on postive visions of where the organization can go that will matter. Your team should play in the future, try out ideas, and then work to interpet what is possible, what is likely, and what is desirable in the future.
A month — You’ve gotten time for several iterations of futures thinking, and time for ideas to evolve and develop. A month is long enough to allow more development of ideas, time for reflection, and time to engage others beyond the core team. The time allows team memers to go off, do research, and expand your knowledgebase.
Do this: Plan to have two intensive sessions with a week or several between them. After orienting and launching the thinking, you can have team members commit to exploring and developign ideas for further discussion at a second session.
You may have time as you start or in the middle of the month, to engage a wider group of stakeholders with a survey or other process for soliciting ideas. That has two payoffs. First, it engages others and helps encourage their interest. Second, it draws on more people’s insights and knowledge, empowering the core team.
A year — You have time and a budget for a much deeper exploration, engaging more internal an external stakeholders, and an iterative process of learning and discovery. This will be a full-blown futures initiative, a chance to explore and develop a comprehensive view of the future of and for your organization.KUKOME Mountain B008J4SBMS Bike Road Cycling 19976 Shoes 001-MTB Men Women 001-MTB White Red ff361b1
Do this: Establish and train a core team in foresight techniques,. Assigning them to complete a comprehensive exploration of the future shaping the organization’s interests. They will have time and should have resources for attending thought-leader conferences and futures-focused symposia.
Among the programs to consider are workshops on the future that engage the thinking of folks across the organization. Building, illustrating, and publishing scenarios [TK links] that show alternate future contexts for the organization will create a tool for use with internal and external groups to further explore future possibililties.
This program year should include its own public relations. At least for internal groups, setting expectations for results, encouraging participation, and communicating emerging results will help ensure that the foresight effort leaves a legacy. Some organizations include in this a space, such as a “futures room” where images and words can be displayed, and where visitors can interact and add their own ideas, e.g. on a post-it wall.
When you have built a view of the future, you should share it widely. Brief the chiefs, your board, and key stakeholders. Publish the thinking. Convene groups to make their own interpretation of the work, fitted to their interests.
No matter the time you can secure and use, if you use it well, you will have a smarter, more foresightful organizatio.
In October 2007, I started this blog. I had pent-up ideas to share about foresight. Over 10 years, I’ve posted 236 times.
Has it been valuable? Plenty of readers benefited. But I know I gained the most. Thinking through and writing the posts let me to refine how I communicate about foresight. And I know that better communication fueled others’ interest and work.
Creating the posts also prepared me for teaching and advising organizations on foresight: its power, its essentialness, and how people can do it with the constraints they face in their organizations.
Foresightculture turned out to be about 95% about the processes of foresight and 5% about “what is the future?” The “how” was a natural fit for me and was where I had the most interest in sharing my thinking.
Blogging clarified for me how I think about foresight, and evolved in tandem with my sense of the role I play as a futurist. That role today is more about being the guide to how to change minds and understand change than it is foreseer of the future. When I sit with others to help them, I’m first and foremost there to help them change how they think.
Here are some insights from the ten years:
So I will keep going. If I learn and others learn too, it’s well worth what is pleasurable time spent.
Thank you for reading.
I will be speaking in October 2017 at “Women Who Count,” the national conference of the Accounting & Financial Women’s Alliance (AFWA) in Alexandria, Virginia. For AFWA, I wrote the article linked below, which closely tracks the theme of my talk.
My key themes:
The Mill astride the river was the town’s heart. Life blood pumped through it in surges of steam, blasts of the shift-change whistle, toings and froings of boxcars and hoppers on the rail spur, shift workers parading in and parading out. Tied up the traffic light? A mill shift was entering or leaving. A man asking credit at the grocery? The Mill cut back hours. New houses going up on the North side? Output and sales are up. Like peasant shacks against a castle wall, the whole town leaned on The Mill, and drew its sustenance from it. Imagine the town without The Mill? You cannot.
You must try to imagine the town without The Mill.
Small towns exist because of a mill or rail depot, a mine, a factory, a college, a hospital, something central that informs, shapes, sustains a community. But America’s ghost towns are often mill or mine towns that lost their mainstays. They didn’t think past The Mill.
Too many companies and sectors have something just like this: a mill, a production line, a critical machine, a cash cow, that is everything. It occupies the front and center of the minds of stakeholders: owners, investors, leaders, and workers. Wall Street sees the firm with mill eyes. Lenders see it with mill eyes. The community sees the firm and itself it with mill eyes.
All of them want The Mill to be The Mill, to churn along, to make money and jobs and community. And all of them define their truths in reference to it. This is mill-mindedness and it can constrain thought and change.
Using foresight to fight mill-mindedness
Foresight can make the difference. Images of different futures are powerful for fighting mill-mindedness.
What is the company (or the town), after The Mill?
Good futures thinking brings a focus beyond what exists now. It can break down rigid mental framing. Without images of something different, The Mill will define everything, past, present, and future.
How to work past mill-mindedness:
Ask these questions of yourself or better, discuss them with colleagues:
Exploring the answers means confronting fundamental questions about how you frame and understand what your organization is all about. And answering them sets you up to consider “what’s next?”.
So build scenarios of your future without The Mill. Re-imagine the organization on a new basis. Those thought experiments allow you to see a future that doesn’t depend on this singular force or asset. It gets you past your mill-mindedness.
This blog has dozens of posts about “thinking differently” and on the power of foresight to work past stuck thinking. See: Thinking differently
My practice as a futurist is centered on helping organizations break down barriers to thought and positive change. If your organization is so afflicted, maybe I can help. Let me know. Email me or call 202-271-0444.
Image: White Oak Cotton Mill, North Carolina, about 1914, with part of the mill village in the foreground. Public domain.
Being a futurist means believing in progress for human society. And it means working for that progress, even when progress seems threatened.
I look, when big things happen, for any evidence that society as a whole has learned something. No matter the circumstance, good or bad, learning means we have gained something. When we share that learning as a society, it is most powerful of all.
The 2017 solar eclipse that crossed the United States was one of those learning moments for Americans. Hundreds of millions of people shared the experience. The hour-and-a-half shared experience was not dampened by division or politics.
The eclipse may have inpsired millions of American children to go and learn more about science, about the earth, the sun, the planets. Where I watched, I was with a specialist in space policy and a Phd student in Astrophyics. We talked about whether more students will now take a course in astronomy, or even major in it in college. Was it good for science? I think and hope so.
Millions of Americans heard about it, millions took a look. The First Family viewed the eclipse from the White House’s Truman Porch. That too was part of the collective experience. Did the President look without eclipse glasses? We even learned from that minor moment of controversy.
My best guess is that American society tends to take two steps forward, then one back. And this experience may be no different. But at least there’s some movement forward. The future gained something.
Eclipse photo: Jane Galbraith Mahaffie
What keeps an organization stuck in the present (or struggling to get out of the past)?:
What to do about it — How to get un-stuck
1. Inventory how your organization is stuck. Pull together a few colleagues who you think are ready to think differently. Together, inventory the way your organization is “stuck”. Consider each of the items above. Which applies to your organization. How?
2. Identify critical forces of change. Make the case for change. Decide what those critical forces mean. Do they compel you to make changes? What is stopping you?
3. Pose sobering, critical “what ifs” for the organization. These should be powerful changes that would require the organization to change. What do they imply you need to do differently?
4. Get beyond key biases. Tell each other what they are. List them. What are they rooted in? See more here.
5.http://Setting aside biases Armed with these self-assessments, open up the conversation about needed change. Go at it. Don’t backslide!
Other prior posts with some good insights on this:
Image: Han Solo in Carbonite, William Warby, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution license
Hacks are shortcuts for getting things done and being clever about it. Foresight needs hacks too. And there are great ones that fit into real, busy lives. Here are six that you can use to get a better sense of your future:
1. Scan the scanners–Find the bloggers, news sites, tweets, podcasts, etc. that select what matters from the wide range of news and information you need to monitor. They are doing work for you, free. More here.
2. Use push–Use email subscriptions, rss feeds, social media follows, etc. to make sure that fresh insights, in the appropriate volumes, flow to you, so you don’t have to remember to go and look at them.
3. Automate serendipity–As you do 1 and 2, be sure you don’t create your own, finely-tuned echo chamber. Find sources that give you breadth and variety. Use push tools online and develop the habits that make sure you encounter things to open and change your mind.
4. Get out from behind the mouse–Going with no. 3, and running over your efforts in 1 and 2, be sure you don’t only learn from electronic sources. Go places, talk to people, see things. Experience the changing world. Surprise yourself.
5. Lurk–Take a note from great novelists—listen in on others’ conversations. This can be about exploring online discussions/social media, even without participating. There area tons of places where people share ideas. You can dip in, search, follow, or just visit, and open up a front for encountering new ideas. You don’t have to subscribe or even have an account, and you don’t have to participate.
6. Take a futurist to lunch–Believe me, they want lunch! Ask most futurists any question and they’re off and running. You will get all sorts of insights. For the cost of lunch, or coffee, or an online post, your effort will pay off.KUKOME Mountain B008J4SBMS Bike Road Cycling 19976 Shoes 001-MTB Men Women 001-MTB White Red ff361b1
Decide what you most want to explore about your future. Then try a hack or two. No matter what, it will expand and enrich your view of the future.
More “hacks” are among my 27 Habits of highly effective futurists