Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, explains why the shortcuts our brains take will always leave us with an imperfect understanding of any situation. We make sense of everything through our mental models. Our eyes and ears might register a full assessment but our brains will interpret and file away this mass of sensory information according to how we frame the world.  As soon as we experience anything, all memory immediately becomes selective. And with time, this is especially true.

Gilbert’s take on our capacity for foresight and anticipating how we will feel about really big decisions is just as arresting. He says our imagination has three shortcomings:

• Our minds fill in and leave out information without telling us (that selective perception and memory problem).
• We project the present onto the future. We assume how we feel now is how we will feel later.
• And we fail to recognize things will look differently once they have happened.  Even bad things look a lot better to us once our capacity for rationalization kicks in.

So what can a leader do with these tricky brains? Gilbert recommends relying on surrogates to improve your judgment.  Keep your frank followers and vocal opponents close and take what they say seriously. They probably are in touch with a part of the situation your brain has blithely skipped past because the information can’t be filed into any of the assumptions you use to interpret your world.  Neuroscience and psychology warn us that “what am I missing here?” is a really big question for every leader.  

I started thinking about what strategic planning achieves when it is successful because a colleague posed a good provocative question: Is strategic planning more harmful or helpful to an organization?  He asked because he was part of a failure.  Before we can understand the failures, we need a good understanding of what successful strategic planning should do. I developed these measures of success from my research and practice.  

1. Did the strategic plan lead to bold recommendations or decisions for the future?  I’ve always maintained that an audacious goal, even if you fall short, will inspire you to go farther and do more than a low risk, easily achieved goal.  I would rather risk inspired work on the upside rather than worry about failure and low morale on the downside.
2. Are you getting early and sustained success in executing your vision and plan?  The plan has to be connected to your current capabilities and culture even as it pushes you to lead significant change. You have to be able to see how you will get from where you are to where you want to be.
3. Did the new direction transform the organization? A good strategic plan stretches and renews an organization. It puts the focus on new priorities and initiatives and updating and improving the programs and services that will be sustained.
4. Does the organization monitor changing conditions and update the plan when needed? The greatest risk for failure is getting locked into a view of reality and a vision for the future that no longer makes sense.  (For example, think growth strategies during the Great Recession.)
5. Is the organization more effective in the ways that matter most to it?
   • Are your decisions increasing membership, market share or mind share?
   • Are you adding to the value your members, customers and clients want out of their relationship with you?
   • Have you increased your influence and power to shape public opinion, policy, standards and practices?
   • Do you see evidence of renewal, innovation and initiative in your people and services?

A strategic planning process that can deliver these results is without question helpful. The harm comes from failing to hold yourself accountable to your plan and leading the changes you say you want.

Are they simply grabbing a used future from another profession because they envy the respect and recognition an advanced degree seems to provide?  In the last decade I have had more than one health professions association acknowledge this perception is behind the appeal of the doctoral degree as the entry level degree.

Some workforce experts have strong evidence that what many marketplaces value most is a cheaper way to get the job done. These fields should be open to maximizing the use of less educated practitioners and technicians who work under the supervision of a few highly trained individuals. But I’ve seen few choose this evolutionary path.  

Or does the marketplace now reward different knowledge and skills? Is it simply easier for the profession to layer on more years of education or a new credential rather than to refocus well established curriculum and credentialing processes? It’s the rare and courageous institution and association willing to ignore a bloated body of knowledge and prepare people to learn how to learn and problem solve in the field.

Sometimes a profession really does need to evolve an advanced practice. While these individuals may have a broader knowledge base and competencies, their distinguishing capability is complex decision making skills. Often experience is the only sure route to these skills.  

And when employers are asked what they value, what they want is individuals who exhibit leadership as well as job proficiency. This is more akin to what Peter Senge called personal mastery many years ago. Personal mastery involves responsibility, vision, initiative and a discipline for continued learning and innovation. Associations might be better suited to meeting this need than educational institutions.

I find it noble that so many professions are restless about the best way to educate and train for their work. I do believe professional associations should lead in shaping the future of their professions. I just want them to engage in these change initiatives with the clarity and courage these decisions deserve.

To keep things in perspective, who can shake the devastating images of Haiti after last month’s earthquake? Our hearts break over the continuing challenges of survival there.  

These acts of nature are not exactly the surprises Ramo’s describes in his book about the dynamic and uncontrollable security challenges facing our world’s complex and interconnected systems. But they do fit with his admonishment to get used to surprising changes. This is an age of the unthinkable and lots of surprises can and will bring our worlds to an abrupt halt.

Natural disasters expose the vulnerability of the systems we depend on, whether we are searching for water and shelter in Haiti or groceries and transportation in Washington, DC.  What Ramos recommends is that we build resilience into our systems through lots of creative, distributed and indirect acts. Centralized bureaucracies and solutions alone will never dig us out of the messes we face.

 “We can each start to live more resiliently; saving more, eating better, driving smart, educating our children to be global and competitive, volunteering, reaching out to neighbors and new friends. Such things are the essential elements of deep security,” Ramos says. He has great hope for empowered individuals working collaboratively to strengthen our society.

As my neighbor, the homeowner association board member said, when I asked if we should expect our snow removal contractor crew soon, “Don’t count on it.”  In times like these, everyone has to grab a shovel and start digging.

Unlike the typical problem-solving route of committees, task forces and project teams, a prize competition casts a wider net for new ideas and approaches. Plus these competitions create a fun mix of competition and collaboration that members may find highly engaging.  

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis primarily aims his foundation at tough engineering challenges like commercial space flight, lunar landings and fuel efficient autos but the foundation is starting to apply its methodology to social challenges. X Prizes, underwritten by corporations and entrepreneurs, tend to offer more than $10 million to the winning team. But it’s the public awareness and bragging rights that make these challenges enticing and give them their great leverage.

The size of the X Prize should not deter associations and nonprofits. First, there’s no reason you couldn’t also secure a deep-pocketed underwriter. Second, you have all the tools you need to make the winning team your association’s latest hero through your website, meetings, publications and networks of influence.

That’s what we discovered when I assisted the American Industrial Hygiene Association in planning and staging a prize competition at the annual conference last June. We adapted the X Prize approach and invited teams to compete in two challenge areas in need of breakthrough thinking. All AIHA offered the winning team was the opportunity to send a representative to the next AIHA board retreat to pitch the winning innovation for fast-track consideration as a new signature initiative.

As AIHA discovered, prize competitions offer many benefits for associations. The members enjoyed learning and collaborating in a different kind of conference session. AIHA harvested lots of fresh thinking.  And AIHA demonstrated its openness to innovation.

Now AIHA Executive Director Peter O’Neil and I will be sharing how to use prize competitions to take on your social innovation challenges at the American Society of Association Executives Great Ideas Conference March 8 in Colorado Springs. We will explain how to create an opportunity statement, identify the focal areas for breakthrough and set guiding principles—basically the core of the X Prize methodology as well as how to manage important logistics like public relations, facilitation and judging.

In this brief video, I describe what we will be sharing in this session. If you are attending the Great Ideas Conference, consider joining us. If you aren’t attending and want to know more, just contact me, mrhea@signaturei.net, and I’ll share a quick overview of what we are learning about this approach to innovation.

Unlike the typical problem-solving route of committees, task forces and project teams, a prize competition casts a wider net for new ideas and approaches. Plus these competitions create a fun mix of competition and collaboration that members may find highly engaging.  

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis primarily aims his foundation at tough engineering challenges like commercial space flight, lunar landings and fuel efficient autos but the foundation is starting to apply its methodology to social challenges. X Prizes, underwritten by corporations and entrepreneurs, tend to offer more than $10 million to the winning team. But it’s the public awareness and bragging rights that make these challenges enticing and give them their great leverage.

The size of the X Prize should not deter associations and nonprofits. First, there’s no reason you couldn’t also secure a deep-pocketed underwriter. Second, you have all the tools you need to make the winning team your association’s latest hero through your website, meetings, publications and networks of influence.

That’s what we discovered when I assisted the American Industrial Hygiene Association in planning and staging a prize competition at the annual conference last June. We adapted the X Prize approach and invited teams to compete in two challenge areas in need of breakthrough thinking. All AIHA offered the winning team was the opportunity to send a representative to the next AIHA board retreat to pitch the winning innovation for fast-track consideration as a new signature initiative.

As AIHA discovered, prize competitions offer many benefits for associations. The members enjoyed learning and collaborating in a different kind of conference session. AIHA harvested lots of fresh thinking. And AIHA demonstrated its openness to innovation.

Now AIHA Executive Director Peter O’Neil and I will be sharing how to use prize competitions to take on your social innovation challenges at the American Society of Association Executives Great Ideas Conference March 8 in Colorado Springs. We will explain how to create an opportunity statement, identify the focal areas for breakthrough and set guiding principles—basically the core of the X Prize methodology as well as how to manage important logistics like public relations, facilitation and judging.

In this brief video, I describe what we will be sharing in this session. If you are attending the Great Ideas Conference, consider joining us. If you aren’t attending and want to know more, just contact me, mrhea@signaturei.net, and I’ll share a quick overview of what we are learning about this approach to innovation.

The design thinker enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, and originality and mastery. Design thinking powers the design of business, the directed movement of a business through the knowledge funnel from mystery to heuristic to algorithm and then the utilization of the resulting efficiencies to tackle the next mystery and the next and the next. The velocity of movement through the knowledge funnel powered by design thinking, is the most powerful formula for competitive advantage in the 21^st century.—Roger Martin, The Design of Business, Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage

As a futurist and advocate for organizational learning, I find I am a kindred spirit with the growing number of proponents of design thinking. We reason our way to strategy and innovation through a similar process.

Roger Martin, author of The Design of Business, explains that we are using abductive logic. Thanks to Martin I can better explain what’s in that “black box” of my mind after I have scanned an organization’s issues and opportunities and make the leap to exciting possibilities.

“Abductive reasoning drives the intuitive spark that leaps across the gap separating the world as it is from the world as it might be,” Martin explains. We have to rely on abductive reasoning because it is not possible to prove any new thought, concept or idea in advance.  Instead we look at the mysteries and discover what could be valid to produce the outcomes we need.

But design thinking injects the pragmatism into intuition and innovation that I appreciate in my own practice. Martin describes design thinkers as balancing exploration and exploitation, originality and mastery. As I say often, “a vision is only a dream without a commitment to act.” We have to keep originality and mastery in balance to keep our organizations effective.

Martin’s concept of a knowledge funnel appeals to my own awareness that organizations have to take a new idea or insight into pilot testing and application to truly refine it. At this heuristic stage it does take knowledgeable and skilled people to shepherd the new possibility into reality. But our aim should be to move the idea into an algorithm stage where the new direction or innovation is fully developed and can be widely deployed by anyone in the organization.

And then we start all over again because conditions do change. Whether we are futurists or design thinkers, we observe the mysteries again and imagine what they could mean for our organization. Then we choose another issue or idea, a new direction or product, and take it through the knowledge funnel.

So I do take one exception with Martin’s assessment. Learning, not design thinking, is the real competitive advantage. Design thinking, likes futures thinking, just frees us to do it in a more creative and yet disciplined way.  

In a world where issues come and go and even missions are tested by changing conditions, I now can see the wisdom of finding and building relationships with the right people. Certainly you can’t persuade people to get on the bus with you fin the first place unless they agree with the general direction you might travel together.  

Without strong relationships that can be sustained over time, you have very little chance of building a great organization. You might have some significant successes picking up a talented team, but once the issues or the conditions shift, these team members may migrate to the next great thing they perceive to be in their interests.

If you instead focus first on the people and the quality of your relationships together, you are more likely to build the kind of power and learning capacity that will be equal to each new challenge or opportunity. And you are also more likely to attract other capable people and allies who want to travel with you.

I still am not so sold on the importance of getting the right people in the right seats on that bus and prefer a more creative and fluid approach.  I imagine people taking different seats on the bus as they settle in for each leg of the journey. And sometimes we might drop off a few people in new organizations and places knowing we can pick them up later when our mutual interests intersect again.

As that song I used to sing many years ago with my young children went, “the wheels on the bus go round and round” when you have the right people accountable to each other for creating a preferred future--whatever they might encounter and wherever they might travel together.

For more than a decade we have been talking about how difficult it is for organizations to learn what they know. This weakness spawned the entire field of knowledge management. But for all our new systems of organizing information, it still comes down to human analysis and action.

Instead of waiting until the next time you are in your own version of the Situation Room trying to figure out what happened and why, maybe it is time to make time for processes that help us humans connect the dots. Here are some low-cost options that do not require the resources of the US treasury to put in place:

• Invest in staying informed.  Scan the key publications, websites and other information resources in your field. Really read one or two insightful articles you uncover in your scanning.
• Truly study any analysis and data your own organization generates.  It’s not enough to know what you are required to know; pay attention to what other departments and units produce as well.  
• Reflect on what you are reading and hearing and transform this information into knowledge you can use immediately.  That’s the only way to retain information long enough to make it useful.
• Ask tough questions regularly that begin with why, what if, and how.  We all operate with assumptions to save thinking time but untested assumptions are very dangerous.
• Develop and promote your system integrators. These people thrive at the intersections of your knowledge flows. Not only do they know their own area of responsibility well, they have a clear understanding of how their work connects to others. They see all the dimensions: your critical operating details and the big picture of your strategy and value promise.
• Declare a “connect the dots” day of analysis and reflection with your team. You have more than enough to learn from each other to make this timeout a good investment.

What makes failing to connect the dots so tragic is how close we almost always are to the knowledge we really need to do a better job. In our busyness we constantly give our attention to the urgent at the expense of the truly important insights and decisions that shape our destiny.