Foresight for [Internal] Change

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Foresight presents us with an opportunity to identify the subjectivity with which we might be considering possible futures. Throughout the process we attempt to make explicit the beliefs and values which might underpin how we imagine possible futures.

We often think of foresight and scenario planning in the context of business strategy, but it can also be used for understanding and supporting organisational culture change. The culture of an organisation tends to emerge from the history and experiences of individuals and groups within an organisation. We can think of it as a pattern of shared assumptions that the organisation has learned about the right way to think, make decisions and behave in relation to a given situation or challenge.

Much has been written about cultural change by people like Margaret Heffernan, and Russell Korte and Thomas Chermack make an interesting case for utilising foresight within organisations to explore the shared cognition which underpins at both an individual and group level within an organisation.

Their thesis is that scenario planning provides the opportunity to make explicit the organisational mental models, the building blocks which underpin organisational logic and reasoning, the cognitive and cultural mechanisms through which decisions are made and action is taken.

Mental Models vs mental Representations

Mental representations are cognitive structures that our mind uses to store, process, and interpret information about the world.

Mental models represent our internal working representations of the world, through which we can shortcut our reasoning, decision making and understanding of complex systems. These models can be shaped by our own personal experiences, history, education and cultural background but in providing a shortcut, they can also lead us to narrow our perspective. Our Mental models are constructed from these mental representations and can evolve through experience, learning, and interaction.

Organisational Mental Models

An organisation’s mental models can be thought of as the internal cognitive representations of how we perceive and respond in the organisational environment. They are the ‘working understanding’ through which we make sense of our organisational experience.

Inside an organisation, these mental models can shape how we perceive challenges, assess risk and even how we frame possible solutions. We also also hold mental models which represent the implicit social forces within our organisational environment; these shared expectations create a self-reinforcing system which enables a stable group dynamic to form. People within an organisation can develop a shared way of thinking, behave in a way that maintains the ‘social reality’, which in turn shapes the group dynamics and influences future interacts, decision making and adaption.

Scenarios as a Tool for Cognitive Disruption

When it comes to scenario planning, we know that an over reliance on mental models can limit our ability to consider alternate models of reality or causality, particularly challenging when we’re faced with incomplete or uncertain contexts.

In the same way that scenario planning works within a business context to help us to unfocus or deconstruct the ways we might traditionally think about an issue or domain, so too can it help us to deconstruct and make explicit, the shared cognition structures or mental models that drive an organisation’s behaviour.

Korte and Chermack present the idea of utilising ‘strategic conversations’ and scenarios as a way to unfocus the mental models of the organisation which can enable us to:

• Explicitly recognise the ways the organisation might normally approach a decision or challenge.

• Practice new ways and different ways of seeing the world, organisational domain or the challenge by widening the view beyond what might normally be considered.

• Collectively reflect on the cultural restraints of the organisation and to play with subverting, sidelining, accelerating or minimising them temporarily.

• Experiment with alternative approaches to decision making or strategic risk assessment within a safe space.

In creating space for these kinds of discussions and scenario modelling exercises, new collective (shared) mental representations are formed. These mental representations might only be temporary within the meeting or within a stage of a project; but given the dynamic nature of these representations . . they create new shared learning experiences within the group which over time, contribute to a reshaping of the underlying shared cognition of the organisation.

‼️ What if . . .

• How might you develop a series of ‘Provocative Prompts’ which help your team to identify all the usual suspects — key assumptions, bias, worldview . . within your organisation as it relates to the challenge, problem or opportunity you’re focused on?

• In outlining the above organisational approach individually and collectively as a team, what do you notice? how similar are people’s cognitive approaches or how different?

• How you might you create a series of expansive conversational prompts for specific organisational contexts where expansive questions could be used to ‘temporarily suspend’ the standard approaches to problem mapping, decision making or solution framing?

• How might you utilise a developed role play framework (think Edward deBono’s Six Thinking Hats), which invites team members to take on intentional postures in the context of early stage problem framing or opportunity analysis?

📚 Read

Russell F. Korte, Thomas J. Chermack, Changing organizational culture with scenario planning, Futures, Volume 39, Issue 6, 2007.