How to cultivate the benefit of foresight

I just got off the phone from one of my favourite clients, Natalie (not her real name). She’s amazing, a real go-getter and always busy. You know the type, she has multiple projects on the boil and a million ideas. She gets things done at an extraordinary rate and I admire her tremendously.

Like all of us, however, she has her hiccups along the way. She was describing an issue with her team today and acknowledged that the problems have arisen from a simple mistake. Had she done x instead of y during the handover of a recent project, all of the subsequent issues could have been avoided. It's easy to see with the benefit of hindsight, but what if Natalie had the benefit of foresight?

Put simply, to benefit from foresight, you need to carve out time to think. Time to zoom out and see the bigger picture, to reflect on your business challenges and consider them from all angles. As explained in this HBR article:

" A focus on information processing, reaction, and execution - while it may feel productive - causes the quality of our thoughts to suffer. Leaders in today’s complex world urgently need to re-cultivate the art of reflection."

I know what you are thinking, you are just too busy! Like Natalie, you have a million projects and demands on the go. Of course you also know, if Natalie had set aside more time to consider both options x and y in the earlier scenario she would have made a better decision and saved herself, and her team, a lot of pain and time.

Natalie and I are now working together to carve out regular time for her and her team to think together. We both believe that taking a few hours each month to do this will improve their productivity and engagement. Natalie recognises she needs an external facilitator to establish the discipline and to teach them the process. After a few months, they’ll have the necessary tools to continue the practice on their own.

I draw on a method called The Thinking Environment pioneered by Nancy Kline who observed: “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first.” It seems obvious, but ask yourself, how often to do you set aside time to think? If you’d like help getting started, drop us a line.