These are times of tension and paradox.  I am thinking of the need every organisation has for a clear and compelling picture of the future on the one hand and stubborn unpredictability on the other.  In some cases leadership is frozen into inaction as a result.  Some leaders however, choose instead to play with a range of scenarios of alternative futures. Last week a senior manager told me she was finding it very difficult to plan.  That was understandable given her understanding of planning:  that it is about predicting the future.  Things got a bit easier when she started to build and juggle alternative, supplementary, or contradictory pictures of the future and then begin to tease out resource implications and impact assessment.  How does planning work in your organisation?

Tags: future

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Leadership, Purpose and Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.