Leader Preparation

Horizon thinking is a tool of both work community and leader action. While it applies to all community members, it originates from the creative insights of the middle-level leader. It entails an attitude change to commit unreservedly to define a specific future for the work community and to the idea of focusing on one or a few alternative future priorities, values, and processes instead of others. Unless the commitment is genuine, this technique will fail. The task of future creation also involves communicating that future and using it in all the leader does. It is expensive of the inner leader's and the organization's resources—especially initially.

After a creative future is defined, the task is fundamentally one of inner leader discipline. That future becomes the standard by which all else the inner leader does and says is measured. The inner leader must also prepare the work community to participate in defining its collective future. Prior to actually beginning work to create a new future for the community, followers must be readied to be effective and to feel comfortable in sharing decisions, plans, and methods of work-community operation. In preparation for this follower training, leaders typically have thought through the future they desire and used that as the benchmark for collaborative interaction.

Scanning the Forces of Change

Creating a community's future is preceded by seeking out and understanding the forces for change in the larger corporation, the immediate work community, and the broader cultural environment surrounding it. Creating an appropriate future for the work community requires inner leaders to probe deeply into the factors impacting the work community and the various communities it serves. They must scan these communities to find answers to basic questions of institutional purpose and place in the larger corporate community and the general society and among professional colleagues. Inner leaders scan the environment for clues to what unique role the community can fulfill. This scanning process seeks answers to questions like these: "What is our role, our service, our ‘business'?" "What does the law say about us?" "Who are our clients, our competitors?" "What is happening in the larger community, in technique, in public opinion, in the courts, in the legislatures, that affects our mission?" It also seeks answers to questions like this: "What is being said by our professional colleagues, our customers, futurists, opinion makers, politicians that affects us?"

Part of this environmental scanning process involves examination of the leader him or herself. Future-building is a complex interaction of the leader's personal values and orientation and those of work-community members. Which core values become part of the final future created depends on this interaction. Scanning, therefore, must equally explore inner leaders' experiences, values, biases, behaviors, and other characteristics that set them apart and make them unique. These factors in the "leadership environment" are equally as important, as are facts about the work community and larger communities of interest of which they are a part.

Three factors are critical here. First, care is needed to ensure that the scan is not colored by existing perception of the present. The scanning needs to be a continuous process. And inner leaders can enhance scanning by encouraging broad participation by all stakeholders—coworkers, clients, customers, and subject matter experts, as well as by themselves.

Creating the Future

Using scan data, inner leaders then create a future for their work community. Creating a future deals with change. This kind of change is incorporated into goals and centers on people. An effective future statement extends beyond the leader to all followers and to collateral communities. At least the following characteristics of an organization's future statement are important. These statements should reflect the leader's core purposes for the work community. They should define and articulate a feasible and challenging goal. The futures statement articulates a goal that has a larger significance than the immediate work objectives, task accomplishment, or profit. It deals with horizon ideas. The statement of a work community's future is a value-laden statement of what it wishes to become. It is not who the members are, nor even how they are doing. It is a statement of what the work community will seek, the purposes it will foster, the nature and character of its product mix, its service philosophy, and its essential self-definition.

Once articulated, the futures statement alters the nature of the relationships between the inner leader and community members. It provides a common purpose around which members can coalesce in doing their separate jobs. It becomes a mechanism to improve solutions to conflict. Such a statement keeps both leader and followers focused on the larger issue—their mutual horizon idea. A futures statement constitutes the raison d'être for the work community's activities. It also serves as a standard for reaching decisions. And it makes clear the directions of the community. It defines their ends and means results.

The procedure for creating a statement defining the work community's future is essentially the same whether it is for a work unit, a department, or the full corporation. The following phased approach outlines a procedure to arrive at a futures statement for a work unit in the middle of the corporation.

1. Identify what the work community does for its clients, the corporation generally, and society. Analyze the work unit's past as well as current experiences, programs, and activities and select its central activity. Inner leaders may have to reinterpret existing goals statements or look at the essential nature of the community's essential tasks.

2. Identify the leader's interests, skills, and areas of commitment. The future created by the inner leader is an outgrowth of his or her cumulative experiences and includes assessing his or her formal education and training, examining avocational experiences and capacities, and assessing leadership skills, styles, and abilities.

3. Identify the work community's clients and customers. Stakeholders come from both inside and outside the community. The futures statement must encompass the needs and interests of all stakeholders or vital parts of the work community will be excluded.

4. Match external client needs and internal personal capacities and interests. This phase of the process involves developing a listing of values, deeply held beliefs, and traditions held by the work community and individual members.

5. Write out a futures statement. Working alone or with followers, inner leaders commit to writing their mental image of a desired future state of being that incorporates the central reason for their being and the guiding values of the community and its leader. Based on this analysis, they may initially develop several versions of the vision.

6. The next step is to select the futures statement with the most "fit."

7. Present it to the work community stakeholders. Persuade them of its usefulness, secure their understanding and commitment, and relate it to the full corporation, clients and customers, and subordinates.

8. Determine relationships of the futures statement to work-community concerns. The inner leader needs to understand all relationships and how the statement relates to each element of the interpersonal relationships network.

Sharing That Future State of Being with Others

Creating a new future is one thing, communicating it quite another. The task of the inner leader is to inculcate that perception of the potential future and its intrinsic values in the minds and hearts of all stakeholders. Inner leaders give it continuous attention by words, pictures, speeches, training, pamphlets, posters, plans, and other actions that help realize that future. Sharing the future is a continual process of teaching others and unleashing the discretionary power resident in the workforce. This task of persuasion is the essence of the inner leader's job (Gareau, 1999).

Sharing the new future involves the leader in communication. But it is communication to persuade (Cashman and Burzynski, 2000), to change the values and the behavior of stakeholders to conform to the new future. This kind of sharing is done in personal contacts, in work-community meetings, and in both formal and informal contacts with stakeholders. The new future definition of the community is an outgrowth of the experience and values of the leader. Inner leaders communicate that level of commitment to stakeholders (Johnson, 1999). In a way, inner leaders do this to act always authentically within those values. Inner leaders, in many ways, model the work community values. They personify them.

Marshaling Work-Community Member Action

Taking action to implement (make real) the future thus created and not other goals, is the final phase of horizon thinking. It is focusing attention to reflect coworker's action toward that future. Action to carry out the defined future involves all actions the leader takes. Implementing it is seen in the words spoken and the people they are spoken to. It is seen also in policies adopted, procedures implemented, programs adopted, changed, or discarded. It is seen in promotion decisions and in firing policies. It is part of space allocation, benefits programs, and salary schedules. In short, all the inner leader does is part of the task of making real the new potential future.

Scenario Writing Guidelines

The role of the scenario is to set forth plausible alternatives in a way that helps the inner leader focus attention on actions that will need to be taken at various times in the future. That is, each scenario should be judged in terms of the following five criteria:

1. Relevance: Does the scenario deal with an important aspect of the futures in a way that permits further development?

2. Usefulness: Does it provide insights, sensitivities, an idea, structural framework, or suggestion that can be used now or in the future to guide policy and leader action?

3. Originality: Does the scenario present ideas that are new or deal with old ideas in new, creative ways?

4. Consistency: Do the conclusions of the scenario follow from its assumptions?

5. Communicability: Is the scenario interesting, and can it be understood by persons who do not have specialized training in the topic or field of interest?

Techniques of Scenario Development

There is, of course, no single, correct way to write a scenario of the future of a given work community. Some hints, from others' experience, follow.

In writing a scenario covering the next thirty or forty years, leaders need to know what the constraints on the future are going to be and where to get such information. Three kinds of data are useful in knowing what the constraints on the future might be. The first might be called trends —forces from the past and the present that are pushing society in certain directions. The second thing is a consideration of events —the things that interrupt the trends—inventions, natural disasters or war, death, disability, or sudden creative insights. They are the unpredictable elements of the future. Along with events, inner leader need also to look at images. Images of the future are what people think the future is going to be like.

Analysis of trends, events, and images helps inner leaders determine what the major alternative futures might be and plan for these alternatives, rather than for any one of them. Then they develop scenarios to indicate what the major alternative futures might be and produce some scenario or sets of scenarios for each of these major alternative futures. For example, some suggest that the two dominant conflicting images of the future of American postindustrial society today are those of continued growth and development versus some sort of conservator society or steady-state society. The interplay of these competing futures can be expected to be a major conflict in the evolving future in America and most of the industrialized world. Other important factors are, of course, possible. Scenario writing helps inner leaders articulate critical forces and bend them to their purposes.

The scenario writer can consider several different types of scenario writing. One, which can be described as future history, involves taking real events in the past and decisions in the present, showing how those decisions might be made, and then working out a plausible set of consequences. A second type of scenario involves a kind of looking backwards from an imagined future. In this format, the reader is somehow transported into the future where someone asks how the world got this way. Another technique can be compared to a conglomerate. This is a technique whereby the reader is—suddenly— somewhere else; and as he or she examines the environment, things begin to make sense. The fourth form has been called decision consequences. In this technique a problem is presented, and readers are asked to vote on one of several alternatives. The future with the most votes becomes the accepted one. This is a very good way to get people to see the importance of considering the consequences of making certain decisions at the present time.