Direct your own future or someone else will

In Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible, written with John David Mann and published by HarperBusiness (2011),  Daniel Burrus discusses a skill that uses “the data of your five senses, as well as that intuitive sixth sense we all have that some call a gut feeling or hunch. But flash foresight goes further, because in using it you synthesize those sensory and intuitive faculties and project them forward through the dimensions of time. A flash foresight is a blinding flash of the future obvious. It is an intuitive grasp of the foreseeable future that, once you see it, it reveals hidden opportunities and allows you to solve your biggest problems – before they happen. Flash foresight will allow anyone to both see and shape his or her future.”

In a recent blog post, I briefly discussed what Burrus characterizes as “seven radical principles that will transform your business.” Frankly, I do not view them as “radical” but each is certainly challenging and I agree with him that business planning and initiatives that are guided and informed by them have a much greater chance for success.

The seventh principle, Direct Your Future, focuses on how to achieve and then sustain control of our circumstances or at least control of how we respond to developments. Flash foresight will help us to, in his words, “go back to putting out fires and digging [ourselves] out from the crises that started while [we] were reading these pages.” Burrus cites two “key” forces that will shape our future (cooperation and collaboration) which are, he suggests, as different as transformation is from change. He views collaboration as co-creating the future with others. “Collaboration is a function of genuine communication.”

Massive global transformation “will happen – it is happening. And it is transforming how we work, play, learn, l9ve, and do everything. It will do more so tomorrow, and even more so next week. It will bring massive disruption for those who don’t see it coming – and massive opportunity for those who do.”

I presume to suggest that Flash Foresight should be the next business book you read. Is it that good? Yes.

The power of “flash foresight”

Daniel Burrus

In Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible co-authored with John David Mann and published by Harper Business, Daniel Burrus discusses a skill that uses “the data of your five sense, as well as that intuitive sixth sense we all have that some call a gut feeling or hunch. But flash foresight goes further, because in using it you synthesize those sensory and intuitive faculties and project them forward through the dimensions of time. A flash foresight is a blinding flash of the future obvious. It is an intuitive grasp of the foreseeable future that, once you see it, it reveals hidden opportunities and allows you to solve your biggest problems – before they happen. Flash foresight will allow anyone to both see and shape his or her future.”

How valuable would someone be to an organization if she or he mastered that skill? How valuable would a team be if all of its members had mastered that skill? How to do that? Burrus explains the process in his book.

As he explains, there are seven “triggers,” any one or several of which can produce a flash foresight:

1. Start with Certainty (i.e. identify and verify hard trends)
2. Anticipate (i.e. determine degree of probability of relevant contingencies)
3. Transform (i.e. leverage technology-driven change)
4. Skip what you think is your biggest problem (in fact, it isn’t…and never was)
5. Go opposite (e.g. look where no one else does, see what no one else sees, do what no one else does)
6. Redefine and reinvent (i.e. leverage your unique strengths in new and better ways)
7. Direct your future (or have someone else will do it for you)

Zappos offers an excellent example. Its leaders were certain that online sales would continue to increase and that it was probable that the process of purchasing commodities would be more important to the consumer than the products themselves would be. They concluded that the most efficient operations (e.g. order processing) would be driven by high technology and that returns rather than sizing was its biggest problem. They defied conventional wisdom that that selling shoes online could not be profit. Until Zappos, that was true.

As for #6, consider these comments by CEO Tony Hsieh: “We hope that ten years from now, people won’t even realize that we started out selling shoes online, and that when you say ‘Zappos,’ they’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s the place with the absolute best service.’ And that doesn’t even have to be limited to being an online experience. We’ve had customers email us and ask if we would please start an airline or run the IRS.”

FYI, I’ll have a separate post on #7.

Meanwhile, I think that Flash Foresight may well prove to be the best business book published in 2011. Is it that good? Yes.