Anticipatory Thinking: An Essential 21st Century Skill
How to enhance preparedness and instil adaptability in designing superior innovation strategy?
By Mattia Vettorello and Boris Eisenbart
A dynamic interconnected scenario
Opportunities lie behind challenges that in the present need to be overcome to lead to a prosperous future. As such, what we now perceive as uncertainties and ambiguity could become a lever to drive innovation rather than form an obstacle. The societal system is highly intertwined and ever-changing making opportunities sensing very hard. In Snowden’s Cynefin framework, such systems are within the chaotic space. The other spaces are called simple, complicated and complex. The chaotic space is characterised by novel practices. There are, therefore, no ‘best’ or ‘good’ established practices. An exploration through action, sense making and response is needed indeed to simultaneously understand the challenge while designing a possible solution. However, challenges and their inherent dynamics are in continuous evolution. Hence, so must ‘solutions’ be. Characteristically, there is also no clear understanding of the cause-effect relationship yet that will lead to a favourable situation in the future. New reasoning and doing are needed to navigate such chaotic scenarios and enhance preparedness. In such situations, organisations and governments need to approach strategy in a more anticipatory manner to deliver innovation in a novel way. They should act and invest in learning, preparing and acting on hypothesised possible futures. This is to create sense of how a certain situation/future may unfold, how that might create impact, whether positively or adversely, and what actions need to be taken in such situation. It forms a knowledge-based database functioning as basis to inform action and decision-making at the time that very scenario will materialise.
Linear roadmapping
Innovation strategy is defined by a future vision where to drive organisational venturing, typically targeting a three to five-year horizon, sometimes even longer depending on the innovation context. To operationalise strategy, a linear and static roadmap is developed from the present to the envisioned future horizon containing major feed-forward milestones. However, because of the above-mentioned ambiguity and ever-changing societal systems, such an approach of plotting single consequential milestones has clear shortcomings.
The linearity of the process hinders the progression and the adaptation through it as uncertainties unfold and ambiguity turns more into certainty.
In the last decade, we have seen large and seemingly solid organisations fall apart due to their inability to act on some significant changes in society. Famous examples are Kodak, Hertz, Nokia and Blackberry. It is known that these organisations were not able to adapt and steer operations remaining blind to a different future. For linear roadmapping to work effectively, there is a need to have a high level of certainty regarding exogenous influences.
Anticipatory Thinking
Building on such tautological examples we propose the need to implement Anticipatory Thinking as a way to learn, prepare and act in the face of uncertainties and unexpected events. Anticipatory Thinking is an essential skill for the 21st century to drive innovation in a constantly and rapidly changing societal context. We need to embrace such thinking to radically change the current, predominant short-term mindset.
The novel mindset welcomes the idea of alternative futures which can be designed for and experimented with.
We can use foresight methodologies to explore them and understand how for example trends, weak signals and wild cards can influence the realisation of any such futures. There are different futures, some are projection of the present, some are preferred, some are plausible, and some are event preposterous. The Futures Cone is a general example of how to visualise different futures. We wrote about it in our previous article.
By applying Anticipatory Thinking in strategy design, organisations and governments can project societal and ecological needs into a preferred future, foster preparedness in case of adverse events and drive innovation effectively. In order to master such thinking, leaders should work on their futures literacy as strongly highlighted in the last Futures Literacy Summit by UNESCO. Futures Literacy is about learning specific capabilities such as the one presented in this short article to explore and acknowledge that futures can be designed for and partially influenced by our choices. It is highly effective in informing today’s decision making.
Using Anticipatory Thinking does not mean that we can predict the future in every detail, it means being able to build models that contain a wide array of actions on which decisions can be based upon.
Actions are specifically context-related to the organisation or government and what they are trying to achieve; for example, developing a new med-tech device or compiling a new policy. It is about building that knowledge-based database of possible directions. This to enhance preparedness and instil adaptability when experiencing a roadblock or trends and developments are adversed to the current direction . It is about answering “what may be future instances that we should plan for, what if something unforeseen occurs, then how should the organisation/government steer toward one direction or another?” To be effective, the actions hypothesised before need to be updated with the newly gathered information and growing certainty of the real situation ahead.
Merging Anticipation with Linearity
However, just envisioning different futures does not help in designing superior innovation strategies. We suggest to merge the two underlying aspects (the connection of feed-forward elements and the generation of alternative options) to define clear ad actionable milestones while maintaining a good flexibility for trajectory changes.
Firstly, linear roadmapping is fundamental to inform each strategic route forward to different preferred futures. Then, leaders need to include flexibility, adaptation and anticipation to increase preparedness and the opportunity to change direction.
This can be achieved by using Anticipatory Thinking bridging between the present to the different projected futures. Organisations or governments should invest in such thinking to enhance their innovation preparedness level. Simply put, they already have plans if any blockage occurs, they can act before any events affect the innovation route irreversibly. Despite the external uncertainties, obstacles and changes arising along the way, this can give internal certainties around what it is needed to manoeuvre in order to reach a certain future.
Organisational and governmental leaders can highly benefit in delivery innovation by embracing Anticipatory Thinking. They should also operate according to the “infinite game theory” which builds on long-term journey over short-term competitive wins. The infinite game’s inherent definition emphasises on the fact that no single wins are necessary to arrive at success. Yet, it requires a superior mindset and process of innovation to go beyond the present and short-term reward to build towards long-lasting competitive advantage. Under chaotic conditions, Anticipatory Thinking can help sense opportunities and design innovation for sustainable futures.
