A lot of mid-career people I meet seem to be stuck in roles where they'd like to be creating more strategic value for their companies, but spend most of their days chasing their tails.
Business decision makers waste 12 hours a week on non-valuable and repetitive tasks, according to a survey last year. For 21 percent of workers in the survey, the main reason they would consider leaving their role was the lack of value derived from performing it.
So it seems lots of people are turning up to work with good intentions, and then getting lost in the fog of war.
One psychological challenge we face comes from hot stimuli. Stimuli are described as hot when the evoke powerful emotions – such as fear, anger or lust. These emotions drag our attention to the short term and impair out ability to think productively about the future.
Researchers in Belgium discovered, for example, that showing pictures of women in bikinis to heterosexual men, or pictures of fast cars to women, reduced their ability to make sensible long-term decisions.
But this isn't probably news to you. When I suggest to people they could think more strategically by escaping the day-to-day noise of hot stimuli and casting their minds in to the future, they need little persuading.
"But how?" they ask.
Scenarios are a classic tool of the futurist and incredibly effective at helping us do something we're not very good at: Stretching our imaginations. However, comprehensive scenarios are quite difficult to generate and require substantial time and trial and error to get right. I've seen some consultancies suggest a comprehensive set of corporate scenarios should take six months to compile!
That might be great business for a consultancy, but does little to build capacity in individuals.
As a psychologist, I'm all about helping people think more productively about the future so they can make better decisions.
This means developing a habit of thinking in terms of scenarios on a daily basis, no matter how rough and ready they are.
So here, for those who don't really have time to do it, is a guide to creating scenarios. You might have to write it down the first time, but eventually it should become intuitive, and part of your futurist mindset.
Step 1: Specify a question and timeframe
You need to nail down a slice of the future you care about AND a specific timeframe. Our minds treat 1 year in the future and 100 years as being pretty much the same, so you need the discipline to get specific on how far out you're thinking.
Pro Tip: Aim for something that's a stretch but still relevant. For personal futures, we'd look 5-10 years out. For your company, that range could be shorter or longer depending on what industry you're in.
Step 2: Identify the sources of change/uncertainty
What, specifically, is likely to change in unpredictable ways over the timeframe you've chosen? As a guide, use the PEST categories, ie. politics, economics, social and technological. But be specific. Rather than just "the economy," choose "inflation" or "interest rates." Even better, identify the drivers of change, such as "oil prices."
Beware: Most people think of the trends that have influenced the period up to now, rather than from now into the future.
Step 3: Find the extremes, then some middle roads
Remember, you're trying to stretch your imagination here, so considering scenarios that look exactly like today or are easy to think about will tell you little about the future. If inflation is an important source of uncertainty in your future, then go for extremes like -5 percent and +30 percent. Then you can choose a couple of more moderate scenarios.
Background: Why think about things that are highly unlikely to happen? While people living in Western Europe and the North America might think these extremes as implausible, you're trying to understand the possibilities, not make predictions. After all, Argentina would love to have inflation of just 30 percent!
Step 4: Describe the scenarios and their implications
This is the part you might have to write down the first time you do it. For each scenario:
What does the world look like?
What are the implications?
What are you going to do, not just in reaction, but also in anticipation?
Important: Don't skip the detail. The detail is what forces you to think strategically.
Seem like a lot? If I showed you all the steps to sending an email, it would look like a lot. Go through it a few times, and it will become second-nature. Even thinking of one future scenario that looks different today is progress!
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