Holding #futures lightly

I am a #potentialist and this absolutely influences how I do #futureswork

potentialist (n)

One who sees the potential in a spark of an idea or insight and can’t help but get passionate about helping others make sense of how they might explore it too.

This means rather than being an optimist and espousing positive futures, I want others to form a view on how something could come to life, could expand, fail or be morphed into a workable idea. I’m not precious about the insight, it almost doesn’t really matter, it’s where it take us that matters.

Much of my futures work during the pandemic with clients was in working through the VUCA and BANI world we were facing and these terms was useful to help rally action and response with strategic intent.?

Post the pandemic I’ve seen orgs realign their strategies to be more sensitive to this volatile world but most aimed at making up for lost time with a steep change agenda.

More recently I've seen massive amounts of resistance to this change, even in innovative companies, and the inevitable term ‘change fatigue’ has been thrown around quite a bit. The interesting emerging signal I’ve heard over the past two weeks whilst reconnecting with clients is that talent is starting to move on as a result of others resistance.

So why are talented humans in great companies moving on?

Delving a little deeper there are unfulfilled promises, stark commercial realities and unfunded ambition. And talented employees, bought on to deliver the vision orgs sold them at the end of the pandemic are moving on to other opportunities.

Last week I shared the term ALIVE by Frank W. Spencer IV founder and CEO at TFSX .

ALIVE (abductive, liminal, interconnected, vibrant and emergent) is a term that helps us define the reality of where we are now and hold lightly the futures we are creating.

I wanted to delve a little more into LIMINAL.

'Liminality is an anthropological term, first coined by van Gennep in his 1909 book?Rites of Passage. The word is derived from the Latin?limen, which means ‘threshold’. Liminality refers to the ambivalence, confusion, or disorientation experienced in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold at the end of the rite.'

In my recent conversations with clients about these employees moving on many of them where commented on 'not quite getting there when we thought we would', or 'change takes time' or 'resistance to change means we needed to try to help it emerge in different ways'.

I'd like to pose we're failing to recognise the liminality of the change we're moving towards and conversely setting expectations of ourselves and our organisations to be 'over this by now'.

Back to my point about VUCA needing to rally action, sometimes change doesn't need action, it needs holding less tightly. Sometimes where we are headed only needs a little clarity and the rest will unfold overtime in a liminal space where we can't force it to occur.

Gentle nudging, guiding, checking in, re-nudging and then letting go might be your less linear change strategy. We might well be closer to our first change horizon than we ever imagined.

I suppose we also need to understand we might never complete the change either. By the time we're in transition we might need to change or adapt differently thus requiring us to continue through the threshold again and again...

As #futuresleaders we need to be comfortable to sit in the liminality and hold change more lightly. It requires us getting over our need for certainty and prescriptive progress.

Failure to learn how to do liminality well might result in us losing the team we have built to transition to our new futures in the first place.