Communicate the plan
The challenge with identifying future trends is that it often points
to the need for change — something that doesn’t come naturally to
most organizations.
Harrison says you have to find a way to make the need for
change clear, exciting, energizing and compelling in terms of what
the future needs to be. From there, you need to communicate a
road map that shows it is plausible that the company can get there.
“Sometimes in the absence of that second piece, the leap would
appear too great for folks, and finding a way to at least indicate to
people how we get started, and the fact that it is something that is
doable and equally importantly critical to the business results that
the organization needs to achieve, I think is key to get people moving,” he says.
Once you get people moving, then it’s easier to keep the plan for
change moving or even accelerate it. The challenge is, how do you
break out of where you are today?
“The way I try to do that is try to clarify in a very energizing and
compelling way what it is, get clear on some broad-stroke ideas on
what the focus should be and get people some thoughts on how
you get started in a way that makes people see that it is doable,”
he says. “I never believed that you need to have a plan necessarily
that needs to add up to 100 percent of what a future vision would
be. In fact, you could argue that if you have a plan that gets you 100 percent there, it’s not very visionary.
“And it doesn’t even need to be fully
thought out — around here folks have
heard me use the whole notion of something called North Star, which doesn’t
mean anything but your vision or where
you want to go. I like to think of it as similar to you’re a traveler and you’ve found the
North Star. The point isn’t that I’m always
going north, the point is that I’m never
going south. I may be going a little northeast at times, I may be doing northwest
because there are short-term things that
you have to manage — there’s a business
need that needs to be met short term as
well as long term — but ideally everything
you’re doing is moving you toward what
you’ve defined as your desired end state.
“There will be some things that blow you
a little off course, but ideally, they don’t
blow you backward. But you don’t know
whether it’s being blown backward or not
unless you really know where you’re really
trying to go long term.”
