Duo helps organizations adapt to the future

For examining the possibilities the future might hold, a crystal ball might be nice, but for foresight specialists Seth Harrell and Lena Young, the work involves more mundane tools.

The pair use data, systems thinking and what they refer to as weak-signal detection – mere sniffs of a change in the wind – to help organizations with strategic planning and other future-forward preparation.

Each has worked for major clients – Harrell, a Springfield native, most recently serving a major East Coast grocery company that he isn’t permitted to name, and Young, a seven-year transplant with experience working as a futurist for NASA. 

Now, they are joining together locally to form Imagine Foresight, a consulting firm that is so new it’s not yet registered.

Startup costs have been minimal, with no brick-and-mortar location, said Harrell, the company’s lead adviser. In short, the two foresight specialists who previously offered consulting services separately are joining forces and taking a local approach. 

Their services range from the familiar – strategic planning and crafting visions and missions for companies – to the downright arcane with a service they call dark future audits. “The opposite of visioning, we take a deep dive into the bad,” their website states, asking, “Were you ready for the pandemic?”

They note that prices for their services vary.

Harrell and Young were featured at the Springfield Tech Council’s STC Squared conference on March 25 with a presentation titled “Future-Proofing Through Foresight: Utilizing Uncertainty and Leading from the Future.”

The presentation highlighted a problem the pair identified for the technology professionals in the audience, which is that the pace of change has exceed the speed of conventional strategic planning.

In their program, they explained the difference between forecasting, which merely extrapolates current trends, and strategic foresight, which equips leaders to make decisions that can generate success across multiple possible futures.

The process, as the pair explained, begins with defining the area of interest, such as growth or decline in particular business segment, to frame where to look for trends. They attempt to pick up a weak signal of possible change, and, like a radio listener making adjustments to a dial, they strengthen it through research, scanning for anomalies in patterns and possible connections from unrelated areas.

From here, a foresight specialist can map trends, build scenarios and assess possible impacts of projected change.

The goal is to create actionable knowledge to inform decision-makers, who can then anticipate disruptions, skirt threats and explore opportunities.

Inspired by Springfield
Harrell said as a child, he was inspired by the city of Springfield’s Vision 20/20 comprehensive plan, the one that predated the current Forward SGF, and that helped to spur him toward getting a master’s degree in strategic foresight from the University of Houston. He is a member of the board of directors of the Association of Professional Futurists.

Young is completing her doctoral degree in creative leadership for innovation and social change at the University of Houston, having earned a master’s degree there. That’s where she and Harrell met and were astonished to discover that, within one of a single handful of foresight programs in the nation, both hailed from the same city.

Harrell and Young are hoping strategic foresight – a field that used to be more commonly known as futurism – can catch on in the Queen City.

“Most of our work is in other places around the country, but we believe that foresight can be adopted here in the Ozarks as well, and we’re trying to spearhead the movement,” Harrell told the STC Squared audience.

Harrell said organizations can be similar to a two- or three-person canoe, in which somebody has to keep an eye far up the river to prepare to steer around obstacles.

“Somebody is in charge of keeping an eye on the future,” he said. “Your data and your trends kind of represent how far you can see down the river. What we try to anticipate is what’s around the bend.”

What’s coming may be a danger, or it may be an opportunity, he said. Foresight is a regular process of monitoring and exploring long-term change.

“It’s something that needs to be built into your organizational strategy and intelligence-gathering,” he said.

Benefits of foresight
Foresight helps to craft resilient strategies, Harrell said, and it can also reduce the emotional burden of being a leader.

“When you get stuck in day-to-day crises, parts of your brain take over, your hormones kick in; they will impact your decision-making,” he said. “What you need in those times of crisis is cognitive clarity.”

Harrell said the most common problem with strategic planning is misalignment. Leaders perceive what is missing for them today and what elements from they would like to have in the future, but there’s not enough discussion of what they will need in the future.

“That thing that you want today might not be the thing that you want by the time that you get it in the future,” he said.

Harrell suggested organization leaders build awareness of whether they are building or fixing things from the past or looking to the future.

“What assumptions are keeping you on the path that you’re on, providing the services that you are today?” he asked. “Are those same things that you’re assuming going to apply in the future, or are they going to change?”

Using the future as a tool allows leaders to better understand what’s happening today and to look clearly at problems that may come down the pike, he said.

“We try to develop what the darkest version of the future might be that would impact you, and then we stress-test it or future-test it,” he said.

It’s a strategy that can yield a sizable return on investment, he added.

A January article in Harvard Business Review, titled “What Companies that Excel at Strategic Foresight Do Differently,” presented the results of a survey of 500 organizations. The survey indicated a 5% better financial outcome for those organizations exercising a more advanced level of foresight.

Future thinking
Harrell said he and Young hope to build awareness locally about strategic foresight.

“Our dream is to build what we call a futures fluency so people understand these terms,” he said. “We can all have a common language in how we talk about the future.”

Young said that with foresight, organizations can build more contingencies, can have more confidence in decision-making and can adapt to changes as they come up.

She said she focuses on social futures. Right now, she said, everyone is focused on the capacity of artificial intelligence to dominate the future; it’s what the foresight field calls the baseline future. But many young people are turning away from social media and have grave concerns about AI.

“They don’t like the way it affects the climate; they believe it wastes water,” she said. “Imagine if you were one of those tech companies and all of a sudden you saw declining business because you didn’t realize this generation is going to be your target audience in 20 years. How does that company pivot when their customer base is no longer interested in that technology?”

The goal is to think about changes that are coming that organization leaders may not be considering, Young said.

Big projects
Harrell said foresight can be advantageous when a big project is on the table. The recently defeated proposal for a downtown Springfield convention and events center is a good example.

“To some people, a convention center was a big, bold thing to try to do, and to others, it wasn’t,” he said. “There are people in this town who want to do big, bold, visionary things, and there are people who are asking, ‘Can’t we just get some help with our social issues?’”

Harrell said employing systems thinking can help convene community members to picture a better future for everyone.

“City leaders saw the convention center as a key piece that would generate a better system to feed the downtown and help with other issues,” he said. “Let’s see some other scenarios. If we use the collective experience of everyone living here, all of us together can come up with other ideas of what bold projects could be undertaken to benefit the community.”

Harrell said many organizations are willing to look five years into the future for strategic planning, but the Imagine Foresight approach is to start envisioning a 10-year future.

“A lot of the issues we face are the result of short-term thinking,” he said. “If we could stretch that a bit further and include more people, it could lead to better solutions.”