Getting Your Future Right

Most individuals and most organizations are just a few steps away from genuinely creating the type of future they want for themselves. The challenge is that the one or two steps they miss when planning for their future may cause them to fall well short of both expectations and desires. In this session, we will look at the pragmatic approaches to connecting your desired future with your current position.

Who should attend: This is a highly pragmatic session and will be of lesser value to people with a preference for thinking about “big picture” and theoretical ideas for the future with no requirement to answer the "how" question for implementation. Anyone within organizations or individuals looking for a process to help them get their future right, who are looking to overcome the all-too-frequent failure of plans delivering on desired outcomes, will gain significantly from the model presented.

What you’ll learn: That typically most organizations and individuals miss a few key steps in their future planning and that, once they include those missing steps, significant improvements in achievement accrue. That there are four key stages and 10 essential steps that must be included to ensure a robust connection between the future, planning, and execution phases of moving toward your desired end goals.

How this new knowledge can be applied: Perhaps the best thing about this model is that it allows people to bolt the missing steps to their existing planning and futures-thinking processes. This enables a ready acceptance and rapid transition toward more effective outcomes. The model helps people make the transition from the theoretical-possibility space of futures thinking and connect it to the operational-oriented space of action and execution of plans. The model presented provides a structured framework for strategic planning that also provides for an organic development over time.

Marcus Barber, strategic futurist, one of Australia's top value-systems specialists, assisting clients with advanced strategic thinking and innovation processes; co-presenter on the National Geographic Channel's TV series Future Matters; author, Victoria, Australia

key words: pragmatism, futures, strategic planning, action
issue areas: Learning and Education, Business and Careers, Futures Methodologies