True story. Within months of taking on a new job, the chief executive of an organization that I worked for, invited me to a daylong strategic planning retreat. All of the organizations who's who was present for this meeting. And yes, I felt out of place. I certainly did not think that the Equal Opportunity Compliance dude needed to be there. But he invited me and said, I want you to be a part of this discussion. Tell me what you think. And the discussion was this. While we are excellent at doing what we do, we are under constant threat. We have competitors everywhere, and some are obvious to us and some are not. With that caveat, he challenged us to break into small groups, and identify competitors that are not on our radar today. But whose innovation will put them directly on the path to challenge us in the future. He charged us to look at their product, the delivery of that product, where technology is going, where we are vulnerable, then imagine a world 20 years from now, and tell him who we are likely to compete with in that world. So we retreated and emerged from our huddles, clamoring the pitch, who we each thought was on our heels. And as a science fiction buff, I was all in and showed all the way out with my ideas of possible future competitors because I didn't want to be the equal opportunity and obvious guy, right? And while other folks did identify obvious competitors, others saw competitors that were completely off the radar. What they described was a possible future for us. That was astonishing to me. Some of the futures were desirable and optimistic and some were scary and dystopian. But what the point of that activity was, was to identify the trends and innovations that we need to contend with today, if we're going to survive tomorrow. While others remain stuck in the noise of the present, we will determine what kind of future is most desirable to us and chart a course to go after it. For this week, I want you to go through the same exercise, pause the video and picture a future for your organization. What will it take to survive tomorrow? Then when you come back, let's talk about what kind of assessment you just did. It has many names, futuring, forecasting or foresight, whichever one you choose by far it's my most favorite. As an assessment tool, the objective of foresight is not to know what will happen, because that's impossible. But to open a window to view a range of plausible futures. You can see that by identifying trends and if you follow them close enough, they will suggest the various paths the future is taking, so that you can be ready for whatever happens. Now take for example, a policy decision made 70 years ago about bussing. Can't think about a bigger social justice issue than integration and the decision to implement bussing as a way to deal with it. A researcher who testified before the US Supreme Court and Brown V Board of Education, concluded years later that he had made an incorrect forecast, about the effects of bussing to achieve racial diversity in schools. Think about that for a second. He assumed that the school's environment would not affect his forecast. Problem was he did not take into account, that integration does not improve social interactions, and attitudes when people are put into competitive situations, such as in public schools. That's what wrecked his projections. Now, what I want you to focus on is not the miscalculation, but the opportunity that forecasting allows. Why you cannot change decisions years later, you are putting your organization in the best position to mitigate or to survive any decision that you make by planning for it. But as we explore the forecast assessment, I want to make sure that we include one of the hottest topics related to DE&I today, which is how organizations incorporate social justice into its DE&I vision. Social justice is one of those rich buzz wordy concepts that is definitely trending upward. Everybody is asking about it. It's the box everyone wants to check off that they're pursuing it. But it means different things to different people and conscious movements and I don't want to insult anybody by not defining it. Instead, I'll discuss its core interrelated principles of equity, access, participation and rights. Equity within your organization regards the fair distribution of available resources, information and policies. Access ensures that people have access to your organization as clients, students or personnel regardless of their identity. Participation is about your organization, providing a platform for people to be able to share their concerns and participate in any organizational decision making. And rights are about how your organization protects its community members citizenship, or they enforce the rights entitled for all citizens. But in pulling all of this together, while social justice principles should already be a part of your DE&I strategy. What we may not be doing, is visualizing the impact of that strategy 20 years from now. Said another way, how do we take the trend of social justice regarding DE&I to create a plausible and preferred future for ourselves? If you're interested, let me show you how to do that. Now the first step in Strategic foresight is to define the future you want to explore for your organization. Futurist called this, Framing the domain. To frame your domain, think carefully about one, the specific area you want to explore which in our case would be becoming a DE&I organization that values social justice. And two, the time horizon that you want to set. For foresight project to be truly strategic, 20 years is ideal. So the question we are asking, is what impact will social justice efforts we make today, have in our world 20 years from now? Step two is to do an environmental scan and locate the trends. For our question we are looking for trends impacting DE&I And social justice to be sure they're valid and trending upward. To assist us in this step, use the STEEP approach to identify trends. The S and STEEP is for social trends such as consumer behavior, demographics, lifestyles like whatever's hot right now is a social trend. T, is for technology trends which are innovations or advances in research that we care about. E is for economic trends such as availability of jobs or the rate of entrepreneurship etc. The other E is for environment, such as what is hot in regards to recyclables or other sustainable efforts. And the P is for political trends such as what politics are polling hot and so forth. Once you've identified your domain STEEP trends, you can then sort them based on their impact on your domain from low to high, and their certainty from uncertain to completely certrain. Then move the trends that are high impact and completely certain to the next step. In step three of the foresight process, you will now build multiple scenarios based upon the trends that you determine were high impact and certain. So that you can identify the spectrum of possible futures that you could face. What is helpful is if you start with your baseline scenario, or the scenario where everything stays the same as it is now and you proceed along the path accordingly. Your baseline scenario is the "status quo" future. You need a baseline scenario so that you can imagine a disruptive force happening to knock you off that baseline. And then you can build scenarios around that. For example, if another pandemic strikes 10 years from now from a social justice lens, how would your organization respond if your current policies remain the same? That's the baseline. Now imagine if they changed for the better or for worse and write scenarios like that. But remember whatever scenarios you build, make sure they are one, plausible meaning they could actually happen. Two relevant, the scenario should be connected to trends or things your industry is doing or exploring now. And three challenging, meaning this scenario should reject the status quo. If the status quo was the baseline shot, a challenge would be to shoot the three pointer or from half court. Then in step four, pick the scenario that you prefer and then work backward to the present so that you have created a path that will get you to your preferred future. Now I know that I've said a lot this week, and some of it may be really out there for you. But it may make more sense when I tell you how I got here. After the summer of 2020, the topic of DE&I and social justice was so hot that someone approached me to teach a course on it. But knowing the truth about this work, I knew that if any real commitment would be made in this space, I needed my students to move past the buzzwords and what had happened to focus on what can happen. I taught the class so that I could put them in the best position to create our preferred future. I knew that in order for this DE&I thing to work, in order for us to be at our best and to form that extraordinary illustration at the end of the DE&I puzzle, that they would be the pieces of that puzzle. Now my first day of class, I told them that while there are many tenants to this work, the one that I live by is this, no one is coming to save us. But if you try you have to save us all. I now leave that message with you. The future is about hope and so was DE&I. Take care of it and I cannot wait to see you there.
