Critical Leadership Behaviors

When considering what it takes to imagine and launch a game changing product or service I start with the following premise.  Great leaders:

The result is that the organizations they lead shape their futures, rather than being shaped by it.  They are game changers.

In a series of blogs post I plan to explore the first behavior.  See more clearly, and with greater insight where the future is headed.

What is the future exactly?

We are so used to analyzing data from the past, I thought I’d start by providing a perspective on how to analyze data from the future. Sounds a little weird but stick with me for a bit.

The future flows towards us.

We know we live in the present.  As we live and breathe, time passes by and the future arrives.  Here’s what that means.

Reading those last three sentences took about 5 seconds.  When you started reading those sentences the end of the third sentence was 5 seconds away in your future.  By the time you finished reading it, that future, previously 5 seconds away, was now in your present.  And by now, is about 6 seconds in your past.

Clear?  As time passes by the future flows towards us.

Our life and business trajectories are mostly stable.

Yet, during the time you were reading those sentences your life (business, personal, etc.)  did not change dramatically.  Who you love, your finances, your career trajectory, and the other things important to you stayed on course.  So while the future was flowing towards you its impact on your life/business and all your relationships was negligible.  In that regard, your present, your near past and your near future are all the same.  They have little to no impact on your trajectory.  Unless of course, you were involved in a catastrophe such as an earthquake.

So….we normally think of time as flowing past us smoothly, much like the graphic below where we sit in the now and move towards the future. . . .

However, when we consider the flow of time’s impact on the trajectory of our lives and businesses it behaves more like the next graphic where the past, present and future are all part of now. What I call the Knowable Now.  Time does not flow smoothly.  It passes by in chunks.  Which explains why all societies have created ceremonies to delineate between moving from one chunk to another: adulthood, marriage, children etc.  It’s a cultural recognition that time is felt in chunks, not smoothly.

We know the past, we know now, and for a certain period of time, we know the future too.  In fact, much of our lives is spent trying to make the future part of our knowable now.  That’s one reason why businesses go through annual planning cycles; to take future events and put them into the knowable now.

The future is divided into know-ability.

What this means is that the future can be grouped by its know-ability. We’ve just shown that when it comes to the fundamental trajectory of our business, barring an unpredictable event the future and the present are essentially the same:

• 5 seconds from now
• 5 minutes from now
• 5 hours from now
• 5 days from now
• 5 weeks from now
• 5 months from now

However, at some point we do reach a time where we don’t feel comfortable that the core issues and opportunities are knowable.  Our data projections are just too unreliable.  Therefore, the length of time between now, and that uncertainty point in our future, represents our knowable now.  Anything past that point we don’t feel comfortable that we can reliably predict our trajectory.   Our future, as we normally conceive of it as being unknowable, actually lies past that point.  Everything, of major importance, is mostly knowable between now and then.

So the future is, from a practical standpoint, divided into a period of time that is largely knowable, and a subsequent period of time that is mostly unknowable.   (Note: In a future post I will further subdivide the unknowable future into two other categories.)

Implications of time as chunky.

Here are some conclusions from this subdivision of the future on analyzing data from the future.

First, all value you will give and receive is in your future, some part of the knowable now and some part of the unknowable future.   Consequently, as business people responsible for  creating and delivering value (shareholder, customer, employee, etc.) we need to learn how to deal with the future.  It’s where we succeed or fail.  Success and failure lies ahead of us, not behind.

Second, I’ve blogged extensively about how innovation involves taking a technology, or new business process and deploying it in a way that allows new behaviors to emerge.

So let’s take the example of Apple’s recent launch of the iPad on Jan 27th, 2010 and determine what this chunking up of time means to us.

Implications of the iPad launch.

Prior to the launch, the capabilities of the iPad, it’s position in the computing market and functionality were largely unknown.

We knew something was coming but not what.  That knowledge resided in the unknowable future.  All that changed on the day of the launch.  Its capabilities, usability and functionality became part of the knowable now.  Of course, on the day of the launch we didn’t know the exact characteristics of all the apps that would be made.  BUT, we could make very intelligent guesses.  They became mostly knowable, as evidenced here and here.

Which means that if a business was thinking about using it to gain a competitive edge they were too late.  Why?  Because on the day of the launch all their competitors had the same data.  They could know the same capabilities and imagine the same kinds of uses.  There was no inherent advantage.  It simply became a race of the fastest and any leadership would only last until the competition caught up.

Working with data from the knowable now does not inherently provide game changing advantage.

Preliminary conclusions of working in the knowable now

1. When it comes to our lives and business trajectories time passes by in chunks.
   • Part of the future includes data that is largely knowable.  That data is in the now. Not in the future. Therefore, now includes part of the future called the knowable now.
2. When speaking about the future businesses should define the time period that represents their knowable now.
   • There will likely be different lengths of time for different topics.
3. Businesses and competitors have access to essentially the same data.  Consequently, if the data businesses are using to make their plans and develop  offerings comes from the knowable now they have no inherent advantage as it’s available to everyone.  They can’t see the future any more clearly than any one else.
4. The development of business strategies needs to embrace capturing data and using it from the unknowable future.
   • In my experience, that behavior, embracing the unknown is counterintuitive for most business people as they perceive it as highly risky.  So I will address how to effectively analyze largely unknowable data in my next post.
5. Businesses that mostly work in the knowable now condemn themselves to hard-fought, never-ending competition.
   • Game changing ideas come from the unknowable future, not the knowable now.

How far out is your knowable now?

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