FT BUSINESS SCHOOL Lecture One: The fog of the future (6 February 2006)
All knowledge about the future - every prediction and plan - is provisional. Our mental models of the future are always wrong, we just don’t know how or when we will find out. The provisional nature of knowledge about the future has profound implications for managers. Instead of peering deep into the future and charting a course, managers must accept that they hurtle forward into a fog with limited visibility into what will happen. This fog of the future descends whenever several uncertain variables - such as technology, competition, regulation, geopolitics, etc. - interact in unpredictable ways that influence a firm’s ability to create and sustain value. Long-term vision - beloved of management gurus and consultants - is a dangerous display of intellectual hubris that often ends in tears.
Key take away: All knowledge of the future is provisional--ignore that fact at your peril.
Readings:
Donald N. Sull and Martin Escobari, 2004, Success against the Odds, chapters two and three (Download the book as a PDF file).
Donald N. Sull, 2004, “The tunnel vision trap,” Financial Times.
Worksheet:
Assess your strategic agility. Navigating the fog of the future requires strategic agility - the ability to consistently anticipate emerging opportunities and threats and adapt to changed conditions. The first page of the course workbook provides a quick and dirty diagnostic of your organization’s strategic agility. (Download the worksheet as a JPG file).
Book of the day:
Bryan Magee, 1985, Philosophy and the Real World: Introduction to Karl Popper, (London: Open Court Publishing). Karl Popper devoted over sixty years of diligent scholarship to working out the implications of provisional knowledge for science and society. His friend Bryan Magee summarizes Popper’s thinking in an accessible and faithful summary of some of Popper’s more important insights.
