4 Questions Visionary Leaders Must Ask To Be Future Ready Right Now

Within the past 14 months, AI proved it can generate images and text as well as a human. Roe vs. Wade was overturned. Remote and flexible work have become the standard for a whopping 71% of knowledge workers in America. Every day, a new set of signals emerge to challenge our existing mental models.

It might feel pointless to think about the future past a few weeks or months. But foresight is about preparation, not predictions. It helps you make better decisions now, and acts as a trigger for developing strategic options in a context full of unknowns.

Signals and trends invite you to consider alternative outcomes from those you previously thought possible. They also unlock a vital capacity: the ability to reimagine reality. This awakens you to the possibility of a future that differs from your current assumptions and expectations, and helps you appreciate that you cannot know all things at all times.

Future readiness isn’t a buzzword—it’s the defining characteristic of companies built to last.

It includes the ability to continuously revitalize and reinvent your core business while simultaneously creating new sources of competitive advantage. Future ready leaders adapt rapidly to shifting realities, develop internal capabilities with a sharper focus, and find new growth opportunities, fueled by a profound sense of purpose.

Now, more than ever, you must consider the potential near and long-term impact of the future’s possibilities. You have to continuously factor signals and trends into your strategic thinking, and adjust your strategy, planning, operations and business models accordingly. You need to make time for your well-being and imaginative exploration. A powerful competitive advantage has emerged for those who know how to re-perceive in the present.

"The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different." – Peter Drucker, business visionary and inventor of modern management

Adaptability is now the critical success factor

Companies were put under enormous stress during the pandemic. It showed who was prepared for the changes and disruptions the future will bring—and who was not. This type of readiness doubles as a source of resilience during times of change.

It reflects how companies can adapt, the flexibility of their capabilities, and how adept they truly are at finding new and alternative sources of growth. As the world becomes more uncertain, it’s increasingly important for you to be future ready.

Consider how healthcare brands and providers have navigated the last three and a half years. Executives have been talking for more than a decade now about how healthcare is moving towards personalized care, mental wellness, AI-driven diagnostics and telemedicine. Then COVID-19 hit. The companies that have thrived are those who scaled such capabilities ahead of their competition.

Take Talkspace , a comprehensive online therapy platform that was expanding its services and using AI before the pandemic. While it isn’t profitable yet, Talkspace is now becoming one of the success stories of the 2021 digital health boom.

Hinge Health , one of the most valuable start-ups in digital health, raised $300M in 2021 to expand their musculoskeletal health (MSK) solutions. Their pre-pandemic investments in personalized exercise plans, coaching and wearable sensors allowed them to provide continuous care even when physical therapy centers were closed, meeting the needs of patients with MSK conditions.

Talkspace and Hinge Health are just two examples of companies that had the foresight to invest in areas that became critical during and after pandemic. Their ability to anticipate and respond to customer needs showcased how adaptability and innovation leads to success, even in the face of unexpected global challenges. Their experiences provide valuable lessons for visionary leaders aiming to be resilient and forward-thinking.

"The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed." – William Gibson, visionary author who wrote about virtual reality before it existed

A simplified framework for future readiness

Spending time in the future comes with its challenges. There are numerous cognitive biases and psychological barriers we all experience. It's the tyranny of the urgent. And the culture of busyness. Being crazy busy enhances our perceived status and self-worth. Fear and ego can also get in the way.

The amount of signals, trends and insights available is overwhelming—and there’s a lot of noise. There's also many possible futures you could pursue. The opportunities are infinite.

At the heart of what I do as a futurist and business strategist is a framework of hindsight, insight and foresight. I've used it to shape the strategic thinking and foresight capacities of leaders from progressive startups to corporate executives. The Kaleidoscope View? will help you see and sense better, and with less effort. It organizes, collides and filters sources of disruption and change, especially the signals that could be your game-changers.?

Think of it as your GPS to use as you’re navigating along the unknown roads of the future. You’ll use it to classify and map the future’s drivers and influences in a multi-dimensional way.

And here’s why this is critical: many of us have access to much of the same information. The value therefore lies in how you uniquely see it and make sense of it, prioritize it and connect the dots.

The Kaleidoscope View? gives you three critical advantages:?

1. Supports non-linear and continuous thinking. Our complex and uncertain world requires unstructured approaches to deal with the ambiguities often thrown our way. Non-linear thinking is more creative and relies on experience, intuition and imagination to understand possibilities. It's more?abstract?in nature and characterized by the ability to create connections between concepts and ideas, even when they're not related. Similar to Mind Mapping, The Kaleidoscope View? helps you continuously capture scattered thoughts, and potential interactions and dependencies.
2. Ensures you don’t narrowcast and focus on the familiar. It’s easier to look at ideas and innovations from your own industries and competitors. But this adds very little value to long-term thinking. It’s rarer to investigate the unfamiliar and disruptive forces, and incorporate that discovery and perspective. You need to look beyond into other spaces, where you soon start to see that innovations in one sector influence customer expectations in another. Given that no two industries are aligned in terms of speed to market, this is a very powerful way in itself to see into the future.
3. Empowers you to be intentional and strategic about your focus. You’re going to decide what kaleidoscopes (or inputs) to play with, and you can prioritize based on factors that could increase your likelihood of success. Given the amount of information you’re seeing and the speed at which you’re seeing it, this is key. Reality is always emerging and the opportunities available are limitless, and you’re going to need a way to filter through what’s important.

"Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay." – Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher, writer, social theorist and feminist activist

4 questions future ready leaders must ask

When starting to explore the future, the key is to not get bogged down in research and analysis paralysis. Rather than getting overly analytical, intuition can be your guide.

Intuition is the way you translate your experiences into judgments and decisions. The logical and emotional hemispheres of your brain use whole brain faculties to convert the kind of tacit knowledge and foresight that can be used to better understand the possible futures your company could face tomorrow.

Here are four questions to get you started:

#1. What could be the major sources of disruption and change?

Think about external forces that no one person or entity has control over, but that play a critical role in how our future develops. These factors influence business, governing and society. They can change the way we look at the world, shaping our attitudes and beliefs. And there are a lot of them.

Mega-Trends such as climate change are one example. These are the forces dictating the lead, showing us the bigger picture, and determining the development of the world for several decades. Mega-Trends are the basis for decisions in business, politics and on a personal level. Critically, they initiate shifts that lead to profound social change.

Market & Industry Dynamics are another example. These are patterns or trends that occur within a specific industry (or industries). They could be anything that alters the market or markets your company operates in, or where you want to be operating in. Examples could be something as fickle as consumer preferences, or as industry-specific as new regulations.?

#2. What’s calling you now?

Identify the internal factors you have control over. By control, I mean considering these insights ensures you become an active agent in creating your future. For now, focus on your intention drivers. These could represent what’s sparking your curiosity, the change you want to see in the world, or what you long for in the future. Also take a moment to reflect upon the why of your responses.

Intention holds a space for that which you desire. It’s the hope that allows you to experiment. Think of it like sacred rocket fuel, turning your good, but possibly half-baked ideas into brilliant, fully-formed bullet points. The paradox here is that if you overthink things, you risk missing out on options you may be blind to because you're too focused on one set of possibilities. So it's important to get out of your head and listen to your intuition.

#3. What do you sense could be secret ingredients?

Consider external factors that are early indicators, describing something that is not yet significant and requires time to mature. These signals are often overlooked and can be difficult to detect. They’re weak, under the radar. Yet they have the power to shape the future in significant ways.

And even if you do see them, you may ignore them. And that’s because people are predisposed to confirmation bias, focusing on what aligns with their mental models rather than what violates them.?Critically, these signals could be your differentiators. And that’s because they’re closely linked with your own interpretation and worldview. The way you take raw ingredients and make something magical.

Outliers & Anomalies are one example. These are unusual or outlying signals that represent deviations from the norm—they’re unexpected. You see something that doesn’t quite fit. They’re the things that make you go “hmmmm." Outliers & Anomalies aren’t usually clear in scope or implication, which renders meaning-making all the more important.?

#4. What do you sense the world could be ready for?

Think about where long upheld beliefs are being replaced with new ways of thinking and doing based on new information—there’s a change in perspective on the facts.?It’s like exchanging an old, outdated map for a new, more accurate one. There's a sudden revelation. Finally the fogginess disappears and the blur turns into clarity.

These forces are driven by mindset shifts. So it’s really important to get underneath and understand what’s driving them. They can represent a distinct moment in time where the world, landscape or market is in the process of pivoting to a new standard. And they help you see and prioritize those seeds of opportunity that could be scalable—so you’re not too early or too late.

Paradigm Shifts like the transformation from in-office to remote and flexible work standards are one example. These are changes in people’s attitude, beliefs, perceptions (and ultimately actions) about something. Paradigm Shifts can be seen in many contexts in business, and could be your golden opportunities. Regardless of where they crop up, they're a radical change from previous, prevailing attitudes that forms the basis of a new orthodoxy.

It's time to act courageously amid the uncertainty

The fear of losing in the near term is very real. But the threat of losing relevance looms even larger. Becoming future ready is straightforward. But it takes courage to drive it.

By allowing yourself to lean into uncertainty—to feel vulnerability and embrace discomfort—you can access new realms of bravery, creativity, resourcefulness and resilience that you may never have otherwise.?

Remember that your journey right now isn’t about trying to identify one opportunity or one solution. Because there are many possibilities ahead, you need to be able to connect what’s happening today with what could happen tomorrow. Once you get the hang of it, it's game-changing.

What do you think? Is spending time in the future a courageous act?

Let everyone know in a comment. ????

—

Found this newsletter valuable?

> Like it

> Share it

> Follow me for more

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About Regan Robinson

Regan Robinson is a futurist, business strategist, advisor and investor building an Imaginarium to empower visionaries to create growth futures for themselves, their companies and communities. She’s the creator of the Sketching Your Future Series,? a portfolio of done-with-you-experiences specially calibrated for busy founders and C-Suite executives to realize new possibilities of customers, strategies, products and business models by being future fit.?

After a powerhouse first 15 years leading strategy and business transformation at companies such as VICE Media and Edelman Digital (with revenue increases ranging from 40% - 300%+ across roles), working with clients such as Viacom, Stila Cosmetics and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and launching 3 startups (including co-founding digital innovation agency Highly Evolved at 27), Regan’s life was forever changed with her Mom’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2015. She began defining her own work-life philosophy, built on the cornerstones of futures thinking, well-being, imagination and intuition.

Ever since, she’s been applying her proprietary methodologies to shape the strategic thinking and foresight capacities of leaders from Fortune 500’s to progressive startups. Regan is passionate about developing alternative ways to build, grow and fund companies (and ultimately reduce the incidences of cancer and chronic disease). She’s been featured in Thrive Global, Jennifer Justice’s Takin’ Care of Lady Business and The Intentional Advantage podcast, hosts conversations about imagination with pioneering CEOs (such as Luminary founder Cate Luzio) and leads fireside chats at boutique resorts such as MARRAM in Montauk.?