Stategy is about the future, so it makes sense to explore what the future might hold before a preferred strategy is decided. But, to explore what is unknowable and uncertain requires an open mind, and an understanding of the lenses and filters through which we see the world. 

I often get comments such as "That's rubbish!" or "That won't happen!" in response to ideas about what the future might hold.  In an evaluation form once, someone commented "This is all fluffy and irrelevant".  All these responses demonstrate a degree of closed mindedness, and an inability to accept or see value in something that does not fit dominant worldviews. 

Particular worldviews cannot and should not be compared in value terms with each other, since each is equally valid for that person at the time and context they inhabit.  Creating strategy, however, needs an open mind to be able to explore options to develop the best and wisest strategy to pursue. Dismissing options because they do not fit with a particular worldview, while understandable, is generally an unhelpful approach in strategy work. But, while worldviews are not fixed, they are hard to shift. 

As Dave Snowden has written:

"Humans do not make rational, logical decisions based on information input, instead they pattern match with either own experience, or collective experience expressed as stories.  It isn't even a bit fit pattern match, but a first fit pattern match.  The human brain is also subject to habituation, things that we do frequently create habitual patterns which both enable rapid decision making, but also entrain behaviour in such a manner that we literally do not see things that fail to match the patterns of our expectations".

(Read here an engagement with Dave Snowden and others about my culling of this quote.)

To break these patterns of entrainment and habituation, the information that informs strategic decision making needs to come from a wide range of sources, and must include the weird and whacky to move people out of their comfort zones.  Remember Jim Dator's first law of the future: any useful statement about the futures should seem ridiculous.  We need to be prepared to challenge our deeply engrained assumptions about how we make sense of the world, and to be open to new ways of seeing and sensing. 

As Jeffrey Pheffer and Robert Sutton, in their book, Hard Facts: Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (2006), write:

"...many practitioners and their advisers are unwilling or unable to observe the world systematically because they are trapped by their beliefs and ideologies.  Their observations are contaminated by which they expect to see ... The result is that much conventional wisdom is wrong."

Applying such conventional wisdom to the future is indeed dangerous but, with closed minds, it is often all that managers and CEOs have.  Managers are not paid to be uncertain, and so will often dismiss ideas and processes that challenge their veneer of certainty.  

There needs to be a rationale and a space to think about the future that moves beyond conventional wisdom and that acknowledges the inherent uncertainty of the future. Introducing futures approaches therefore starts with re-thinking what is commonly understood as the strategic planning process, to recognise and surface the place in that process that gives people permission to spend time thinking about the future and overtly dealing with uncertainty - before deciding on strategy.

•  'well, I already think about the future everyday', and
•  'I don't need you to tell me how I should think about the future'. 

The point here is that everyone thinks about the future - it is an innate human capacity. And, it is NOT a capacity reserved exclusively for senior managers in an organisation.

We think about the future in our individual brains, and that thinking is filtered by our individual worldviews, the lens through which we see and make sense of the world.  In our own brains, we probably view ourselves as pretty good at exploring the future, and that may well be the case.

But ... when we bring our individual futures thinking to the strategy table, there needs to be overt processes in place to surface the individual thinking and to explore the implications and assumptions held in that thinking.  In this way, uncertainty can be acknowledged and explored. 

Without such overt processes, we run the risk of the views of the Vice-Chancellor or CEO taking precedence.  While the final decision about strategy does ultimately rest with the VC or CEO, it is the scope of the thinking that informs that decision that is the space strengthened by futures approaches. And, some VC's are open to having their thinking informed, but others are not.

A VC or CEO with an 'open mind' is likely to innately seek out and listen to the views of others before making decisions about future strategy. The VC or CEO who has a closed mind, who has supreme confidence in their view of the future is unlikely to want to spend much time listening to and exploring the views of the future held by the executive team, or by staff in the university or organisation. Even when lip-service is paid to consultation and feedback from staff is sought, a mind closed to alternative views will often miss the potential or the message in that feedback.