Failure to anticipate change can be fatal. As any chess player, military strategist, or athlete can tell you, being anticipatory gives you great competitive advantage. But what is the secret to developing anticipatory prowess, and how do you use it to gain strategic advantage? These are key questions that all organizations face, whether businesses, schools, government agencies, or community groups. In a complex and rapidly changing society, being anticipatory and gaining strategic advantage requires sophisticated intelligence-gathering techniques, new models of decision making, and ways to judge the results. Collectively, these tools allow you to identify new opportunities, avoid being blindsided by external forces, and turn potential threats into opportunities. Failure to anticipate can be deadly: Your community is overrun with subdivisions and shopping malls with no concern for citizen well-being, and you organize only after it is too late. A competitor anticipates customer wants and overruns your territory, gobbling market share: Checkmate. even big organizations with considerable internal resources have failed to anticipate dramatic outside shifts and have faced the unanticipated checkmate. For example, GM failed to heed signals in the late 1960s of a potential energy crisis, as well as the increasing attractiveness of small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars. Ignoring these signals cost GM almost 30% of its U.S. market share. Sears in the 1970s continued to "fiddle" with self-branded merchandise, monolithic department stores, and catalog delivery systems, while customers asked for name-brand merchandise and for more quality in products and services.
It is important to understand how strategic information flows from outside to inside your organization. Otherwise, you may find yourself befuddled by an issue for which ample information already exists somewhere in the organization. A sports trainer may know that the star player has a degenerative back condition, but if he or she does not tell the coach, the team may suffer when the condition becomes serious later on. In the late 1980s, Motorola had an enormous amount of information about the relationship between cellular phones and possible neurological damage. But the company did not use the information to manage this potential issue. Instead, an outsider presented the case for a positive link between the two and set off a somewhat hysterical public debate, in which Motorola took a real bashing.
Management relies heavily on processes and responsibilities. The decision process model helps you follow the flow of strategic intelligence through an organization and assign accountability or responsibility for responding to that intelligence. emerging issues may be complicated, but the process by which they are dealt with should not be. Here is a simply structured Management Accountability Model:
- Assign the anticipatory management function. The title of the manager charged with the anticipatory management function varies within organizations - in business, it ranges from issues manager to public affairs manager to vice president for public relations or strategic planning. We'll use the generic term anticipatory manager. The anticipatory manager's duties are to oversee the strategic intelligence system, identify issues from numerous sources, analyze and compile trend information into issue briefs for consideration by a steering committee, and facilitate action and policy teams.
- Form a steering committee. The steering committee is made up of senior staff or volunteers selected by the leadership to screen and prioritize emerging issues that have already been identified. This team should possess an in -depth knowledge of the organization and have an open mind to the external forces with influence on the organization. Their duties are to review the issue briefs; determine implications and degree of organizational opportunity or vulnerability; rate issues on the basis of probability, impact, and whether the organization can or should influence them; and develop consensus on the degree of organizational involvement.
- Manage the issues. If an issue has been given a high priority, the steering committee assigns "ownership" for the issue by determining which person or group could most benefit from or be hurt by it. Ownership does not imply that work on the issue should be carried out exclusively by the "owner." The anticipatory manager works with the owner to select an action team, set an agenda, and facilitate team meetings as necessary. When possible, monitoring events and trends on a systematic basis should be the responsibility of a separate issues management staff to ensure that all necessary information will be evaluated.
- Inform the leadership. At this stage, the steering committee reviews the action plan presented by the issue owner, including details of what is to be done, why, by whom, when, how much it will cost, and where the money will come from. Because many action plans involve cross-disciplinary work teams, it is crucial that all parties agree to it. The steering committee then forwards the plan to the leadership, who may need to quiz the committee on such issues as the involved parties' positions and technical and operating objectives.
Using the decision process and the accountability models together assures that your organization is linked to its external macroenvironment and ready to act. If your organization spends its time solving problems and resolving crises, it will have little time for innovation. The tendency to race headlong into the future while looking in the rear-view mirror (to see how something was done in the past) and out the side windows (to see how the competition is doing it) has proven unproductive over the long haul. With foresight and anticipation, your organization will be more productive. Anticipatory management provides systematic and formal ways of understanding the world outside the organization. However, anticipatory management only becomes useful when it penetrates the "inner world" or minds of the participants.
The human mind works by using accumulated experience to construct an internal model of the external reality. The tools of anticipation offer important additional information about the outside world. More significantly, they fundamentally alter perceptions, challenge prejudices, and open your mind to new insights so that you and your organization will know what to do, how to do it, and what the outcome might be.
Bibliography
1. Anticipatory Management: 10 Power Tools for Achieving excellence into the 21 st Century (Issue Action Publications, 1995).
2. Cognitive Aspects of Decision-Making Project Summary, July 2000.
3. Body, J. and McCarthy, B. Supporting Strategic Decision Making (Sydney, 1999).
4. Goodman, R.e. and Chinowsky. Knowledge Management and Intelligent Decision Support , (Melbourne, 2000).
5. Hutchins, S. G. "Decision Making errors." (1996).
