In the outset of their book Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth, the futurists Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz discuss the perils of what they term the “present-forward fallacy”-the belief that organizations can envision the future by incrementally expanding on what they’ve done in the past.
The first passenger trains are a case in point. The trains amounted to little more than a locomotive pulling a line of stagecoaches along a track, with the good seats inside and the cheap seats on the roof. The earliest automobiles followed the same logic: engines mounted on stagecoaches that were notoriously noisy and uncomfortable to ride in.
Rather than merge the range of accessible technologies to envision the future passenger train car or automobile, the early proponents of these future technologies looked in the rear view mirror. They drew on the way that transportation worked in the past to define how it would work in the future.
The ‘present-forward fallacy’
Research in Motion (RIM), the manufacturer of the Blackberry smart phone, learned the limits of that approach on January 7, 2007. That was the day that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, unveiled the first iPhone—an iPod, phone, and internet communicator in one device with a digital touchscreen. RIM’s decision to ignore the iPhone and continue incrementally improving the Blackberry led to its loss of the handset war by 2013.
Given the speed of technological change, future visioning is required to address disruptive technologies like the iPhone that can reshape entire industries seemingly overnight. Yet visioning requires leaving, if momentarily, the earth’s gravitational pull. For Johnson and Suskewicz, that means looking 5-7 years into the future, where the horizon appears fuzzy, like an impressionist painting.
To identify that future, they challenge leaders to identify key “inflection points” in their industry. In the automotive industry, they point to autonomous vehicles. A world dominated by driverless cars would not only make car ownership obsolete, but see auto insurance rates plummet, ridesharing fleets boom, and auto manufacturers cede ground to tech companies like Google and Apple.
Once the future is identified, and an organization’s place in it, they urge leaders to work backwards to the present—walking the vision back, and planting seeds today that will help them arrive at that desired future.
Learnings from the finance sector
In the case of a credit union (MMCU) that we recently worked with, that inflection point consisted of something called “embedded finance”—money appearing instantly and transparently in any context. Whether making a purchase with a smartphone in the grocery store, opting for buy-now-pay-later at the point of sale, or tipping an Uber driver through an Uber app, payments are made naturally and invisibly at the point of context.
The financial technology companies (fintechs) driving this trend have successfully pierced the protected business space of banks and credit unions by embedding finance everywhere. Whether making payments, transferring money, or financing a home, it can all be done with an app on a phone, peeling revenue away from traditional players.
In our work with MMCU, we captured the essence of this and other disruptive threats. We then facilitated a discussion with the leadership about how MMCU’s business model might morph in response to these threats. From the conversation, it became clear that MMCU needed to continue to develop easy payment and money transfer solutions.
Given its size, MMCU also needed to partner strategically with fintechs that could help in areas like digital onboarding, loan origination and identify verification. To forge such partnerships, MMCU also needed to leverage its custom-coding capabilities to gain access to real-time data, eliminate data silos and leverage the benefits of data analytics driven by artificial intelligence.
Forming a vision statement
Each of these future directions were part of the foundation for MMCU’s vision statement. As Johnson and Suskewicz note, a good vision statement should be more than a generic phrase or two. In fact, it should tell a succinct story in a couple of paragraphs about what the future will hold, what it means for your organization and how your organization will shape the future.
At the end of the day, every organization should have a strong vision statement. The vision should tell the “what” and “why” of where the organization is headed and how it plans to get there.
