Foresight - A Leadership Competency

We’ve been working recently on a new project for a Federal Government agency client. We’re designing and providing a professional development course for their cadre of women and men newly promoted to the Senior Executive level. The focus of the course is strategic foresight – the mindset, methods, and tools, and how to employ them in their roles as the newest senior leaders of the agency. 

I’m pleased that this organization wants their people to learn about strategic foresight – and of course pleased that they chose Foresight Vector as their partner and advisor. And as we’ve been working together, I’m finding that what they want us help them with is even more significant than I’d hoped it would be.

It’s one thing, and a valuable one, to help a group learn about the tools and methods – about how to “do” strategic foresight.  It’s another to focus as we’re doing here, on strategic foresight as a leadership competency – how to see the world and their executive roles through this lens.

In this course, we’ll be talking not only about how foresight methods illuminate what’s changing in society, technology, the economy, and other domains, and the implications of those changes. Even more importantly, we’ll also focus on foresight as a means of anticipating and shaping how the agency they lead must change, and putting those changes into motion.

So yes, it’s a leader development course, about foresight. But it’s also an organizational culture initiative. I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating over the past few years with consultant and Inc. Magazine columnist Jim Kerr. He refers to his work as “culture by design,” and it’s an important idea. Leaders get to choose the culture of the organizations they lead. It’s actually more than that – they’re obliged to choose it, and then work to create it. That’s what I see this agency striving to do, in a variety of ways. I’m glad that foresight for their leadership team is part of it, and that I’m contributing something to it.