A phrase we have repeatedly heard recently is, “We didn’t see it coming.” This applies to various things, such as social unrest, climate change, COVID, etc.
When we bring this into the world of management and the role of managers and teams in the organization, not seeing it coming (in any domain) reveals a significant area for learning and, in some cases, may even unveil more incompetence in how management is approached.
In the organizational context, not seeing it coming implies that the assumptions upon which I have structured my strategy and planning need to be more accurate, correct, or insufficient. Dr. Humberto Maturana once said, “The domain of planning is more restricted than the domain of life.”
We can give ourselves an explanation that diminishes our power, such as being in VUCA or BANI contexts. Still, that explanation will only lead us to realize that in other circumstances, given that “the context is so uncertain,” new phenomena will likely appear that we won’t be able to foresee.
This has a deep-rooted connection to learning. We have held onto and continue to hold onto practices that have worked for us in specific contexts, repeating them as if they were a formula to apply at every opportunity. However, we know that if the context changes, it’s the species that adapt the best that will prevail. In organizations, it will be those capable of learning from their experiences and capitalizing on that learning to expand their repertoire of approaches to their challenges.
The anticipation of the future and future design strategies have much of this in the background. Questions like “What is the emerging future?” “What change signals should we have in view to anticipate a possible change in contexts?” and “How can we start facilitating that desired future in the present (among many possible non-linear futures) so that we become actors who help build that future?”
A significant clue lies in our adaptive capacity, learning to respond effectively and agilely to environmental changes, knowing that it is dynamic and will inevitably be constantly changing. This allows us to modify our course in pursuit of a better response to the environment. This must be accompanied by a new capacity for listening, one that can see beyond its beliefs and dogmas and listen to the clues that were in the system and could have been heard attentively to design strategies in which we use that anticipatory capacity as a competitive advantage.
Strictly speaking, if we stop and think about it, COVID, social unrest, and global warming (to name a few examples) have enough evidence and research to take action. Therefore, “we didn’t see it coming” is a poor explanation for phenomena in which we could have been actors with the power to take action.
The article was initially published in Clase ejecutiva UC by Pablo Reyes and Natalia Cordova.
