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Chia, Robert
What prevents organizations from noticing transformations occurring around them? Why do they find themselves easily caught and surprised by a new turn of events? Why must organizations constantly revise their forecasts and change their priorities? Why do they so often lack foresight?
This topic introduces you to the power of foresight and shows you how it can be carefully cultivated by re-educating attention. Foresight is the capacity to be finely tuned in to the undercurrents of events and happenings all around us. It involves developing the ability to see what is unseen or overlooked and seeks meaning and coherence beneath the surface of things. The ability to 'read' and 'interpret’ the changing moods of markets, popular opinions, customers, and employees are vital capabilities that no forward-looking individual or business can afford to ignore.
The objectives for this topic are to:
- Show the consequences of a lack of foresight.
- Understand why and how we develop perceptual blindness that restricts our capacity for foresight.
- Develop attentional strategies in your daily managing that help cultivate an awareness of the unseen, the obscure, and the overlooked.
Here's How it Works
Each CoachingOurselves topic is used by a team of 4-6 managers to guide a 90 minute discussion. Working through the topic one page at a time, the team reflects on their own experiences guided by the content, questions and exercises. There is no pre-work and no laptops, and the meetings are held anywhere managers normally hold work meetings.
"Experience is not enough. People may learn little from their experience unless they have a means for classifying and analyzing it" - Saul Alinsky
The management team begins by using a first topic with the support of a facilitator. They continue with or without the facilitator for the next 4-6 topics, bi-weekly or monthly, followed by a questionnaire to evaluate results and integrate learning. CoachingOurselves is used standalone, or included in broader initiatives to implement balanced 70-20-10 management learning programs.