Scan Before You Plan
Welcome back to?Curiouser, our monthly newsletter with insights about leadership. This month's edition is about the?keeping up with trends (like AI).
Scanning the Landscape
“When you think about companies that failed to adapt to a changing landscape, which brands come to mind?”
That’s a question I ask participants in our Scanning Your Business Environment module. The obvious names often make the list: Kodak, Blackberry, Blockbuster.
I got a different response recently when I asked that question to the leadership team of a large manufacturer. After calling out MySpace and Polaroid, a leader in the room said, “Us.” He then explained that one of their largest suppliers had gone up for sale, but they passed on the purchase as it didn’t fit with their business model. A month later, their largest customer in Europe acquired that supplier, and along with it, bargaining power that put pressure on both cost of materials and pricing.
When I asked if they could’ve anticipated that chain of events, the leader’s response surprised the room: “Yes. We knew that customer was on a buying spree, and we knew that supplier was for sale. Had we stopped to survey the landscape, I have no doubt we would’ve connected the dots and anticipated this—and maybe, made a different decision.”
Consistently predicting future trends, such as the rapid emergence of generative AI, isn’t just hard—it’s impossible. But anticipating changes ahead by scanning for trends is possible—and it’s a learnable skill. Here’s how to do it:
1. Find Sources of Insight
The most insightful business leaders certainly draw on their wisdom and experience. They also rely on trusted sources to feed their knowledge of their business environment.
You, too, can get smart on what lies ahead by learning from your own sources of insight. Here are some ideas:
2. Scan Collaboratively
As important as it is to find insightful sources of information, scanning your business environment shouldn’t be a solo endeavor.
By collaborating with others to scan, you’re more likely to find blind spots, counteract bias, and get a more accurate picture of changes ahead. Leadership & Co. teaches a proven methodology for running collaborative scanning sessions that help leaders identify, analyze, and evaluate risks and opportunities of emerging trends.
Finding collaborators with different professional and lived experiences is important, too, as we explained in our May newsletter about networking. Crisis and change expert Eric J. McNulty calls these nontraditional sources of insight, and they are invaluable to discovering surprising insights. By finding thought partners who work in unrelated industries, you’ll likely be rewarded with unexpected intel about trends on the horizon.
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Scanning Isn't a One-and-Done Effort
While machine learning and AI have been around for decades, it was only in the past few years that the technology reached the maturity to provide powerful generative capabilities for businesses. As author and AI thought leader Markus Bernhardt points out, “It’s a continuous process to scan the AI space in such a fast-changing world. Staying on top of trends like AI requires constant scanning of your environment.”
3. Anticipate Possibilities Ahead
By anticipating possible trends—even those we may not fully understand or those with a high degree of uncertainty—we can begin to prepare today for the customer and business environment of tomorrow.
As the leader I recently worked with discovered (with the benefit of hindsight), his company would’ve been better prepared for their biggest customer to become their biggest supplier if they’d been scanning for possibilities: M&A activity was at record levels, that particular customer had been making lots of acquisitions, and the supplier had been for sale for some time.
Covid-19 is another example of an event we could have prepared for by scanning for what could happen in the future. Public health experts had long warned of a coronavirus-like pandemic, and in 2015, Bill Gates delivered a widely seen TED Talk on the Ebola outbreak and how ill-prepared we were for a larger global pandemic. Nevertheless, most of us were blindsided by how deadly and disruptive Covid-19 was, and most organizations were insufficiently prepared to respond.
Many of missed the emergence of generative AI, as well. Fortunately, it’s not too late to catch up and even gain ground.
Despite all the uncertainty ahead, Amy Webb, a futurist and professor, points out that the most important thing organizations can do to prepare for AI is methodically plan for the future. That requires learning about generative AI’s capabilities and limitations and adopting a culture of continuous improvement.
Your 30-Day Challenge
Over the next 30 days, try doing at least one thing to scan for changes and trends ahead. Here are a few ideas:
Stay curious!
- Leadership & Co.
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