Course Overview

This course belongs to the Strategy and Strategic Planning category. It is built for top leaders and bosses who must make the biggest choices for their company. Making choices for today is hard work, but planning for what will happen five or ten years from now is even harder. This training shows you how to look ahead, guess what the market will do, and make smart choices right now to keep your business safe. We use very simple steps to help you see the future clearly. By the end of this program, you will know how to gather facts, build a plan, and lead your team into the future with strong confidence.

Introduction

A At the top levels of any business, every choice you make is a heavy one. If you pick the wrong path, the whole company can lose money or fail. You cannot know exactly what the future holds. No one has a magic ball. But you can look for clues. You can see how people buy things, how new tools change the work, and how the world is moving.

This course teaches you how to find those clues. We call this strategic foresight. It simply means looking far ahead before you walk. Many leaders only look at the problems right in front of them. They fix today but forget about tomorrow. We will help you break that bad habit. You will learn how to build different pictures of what tomorrow might look like. You will learn how to stop your own personal feelings from ruining a good choice. We will give you the tools to make bold choices, even when you do not have all the facts.

Learning Objectives

By the time you finish this program, you will be able to:

• See early warning signs of big changes coming to your market.
• Pick the best path for your company even when the future is not clear.
• Create different stories of what the future might be so you are never surprised.
• Stop bad thinking habits that cause leaders to make poor choices.
• Listen to facts and numbers instead of just guessing what to do.

Our Unique Training Methodology

We believe that sitting and listening to someone talk all day is boring. You learn best when you actually practice making hard choices.

• Future Games: We will put you in a room with other leaders and ask you to play a game about the future. You will have to make fast choices to save a fake company.
• Choice Talks: You will bring a hard choice you are facing at your real job to the class. The group will talk about it and help you find the best answer.
• Real Company Stories: We will read stories about real companies. We will look at the ones that planned well and became rich, and the ones that ignored the future and went out of business.

Pre-course assessment

Before you sit in your first class, we want to know how you think right now. Please finish these simple tasks.

• Your Choice History: Write down one really good choice you made last year and one really bad choice. Explain why they turned out that way.
• The Five Year Guess: Write one page about what you think your business field will look like five years from today.
• Habit Check: Take a short quiz to see if you let your personal feelings get in the way of facts.
• Basic Chart Reading: A fast test to make sure you can read a simple line graph and spot a trend.

Course Outline

Module 1: What is Strategic Foresight?

• Learning how to look past next month and see the next five years.
• Why guessing is dangerous and careful planning is safe.
• How to keep your eyes open for weak signals of big world changes.
• Making quiet time in your busy week to just sit and think about the future.

Module 2: The Steps of a Good Choice

• The simple steps you must take before you make a final decision.
• Why acting fast is sometimes much better than waiting for more facts.
• Knowing when to ask your team for help and when to decide all by yourself.
• Writing down the exact reasons you made a choice so you can learn from it later.

Module 3: Seeing the Big World Picture

• Looking at the whole world instead of just staring at your own office.
• How changes in government rules or money trends change your daily sales.
• Making a clear map of who your real business rivals are today.
• Finding blank spaces in the market where no one is selling anything yet.

Module 4: Building Future Stories

• What a future story is and how it helps you plan for bad times.
• Building a worst case story, a best case story, and a middle case story.
• Telling these stories clearly so your workers understand what might happen.
• Planning exactly what you will do if the worst case story actually comes true.

Module 5: Stopping Bad Thinking Habits

• Why humans naturally only look for facts that agree with what they already think.
• How to force yourself to listen to people who tell you that your plan is bad.
• Why keeping a bad project going costs much more than just quitting it today.
• Setting firm rules to make sure you look at all sides of a problem.

Module 6: Using Data to Look Ahead

• Looking at sales numbers and daily facts to find a hidden trend.
• Why the numbers from last year do not always tell you what will happen next year.
• Mixing hard data on a paper with what you see and hear with your own eyes.
• Knowing how to spot when someone is showing you fake or confusing data.

Module 7: Balancing Risk and Reward

• Figuring out how much chance you should take to get a really big win.
• Finding out exactly how much money your company can afford to lose if you fail.
• Placing very small bets to test an idea before you spend all your money on it.
• Always having a backup plan ready to go in case your first choice fails.

Module 8: The Problem with Group Choices

• Why big groups of people often make very safe, boring, and slow choices.
• Stopping the loudest person in the room from taking over the whole meeting.
• Finding ways to get the quiet people to share their really good ideas.
• Using simple voting methods to pick the best path quickly and fairly.

Module 9: Dealing with Sudden Surprises

• What a leader must do when something huge and totally unexpected happens.
• Keeping a very cool head when everyone else in the building is panicking.
• Gathering a small team of smart people to make fast choices during a disaster.
• Knowing what to say to the public and your buyers when things go wrong.

Module 10: Building a Team that Looks Ahead

• Hiring new workers who naturally like to think about what comes next.
• Giving rewards to team members who find new market trends and share them.
• Making your office a safe space where people can talk about crazy new ideas.
• Sending your workers out to see what other companies in other towns are doing.

Module 11: Deciding When to Stop

• Knowing the exact moment a project is dead and needs to be shut down.
• Learning to say no to good ideas so you have time to focus on great ideas.
• How to kill a product that your customers no longer want to buy.
• Moving your best workers from old, dying projects to new, growing ones.

Module 12: New Tools and the Future

• How new computers, robots, and machines will totally change how you work.
• Deciding when it is smart to buy new tools and when it is better to wait.
• Looking at how new tech changes what your customer expects from you.
• Keeping your business numbers and private data safe from online thieves.

Module 13: Doing the Right Thing

• Making sure your big choice does not hurt people, towns, or the earth.
• Why being fair and honest makes your company much more money in the long run.
• Looking past simple legal rules to do what is actually right and good.
• How to explain a very hard, painful choice to your workers and your buyers.

Module 14: Putting the Plan into Action

• Moving from just thinking about the future to actually doing the hard work.
• Giving very clear orders so everyone in the building knows their new job.
• Setting dates on a calendar to check if the new plan is working as you hoped.
• Fixing the plan right away if it hits a wall in the real world.

Module 15: Your Personal Leader Plan

• Knowing exactly what parts of your job you are good at and where you need help.
• Finding a trusted friend outside the company to check your choices.
• Making time every single week to close your door, sit quietly, and think.
• Making sure you leave a very strong and safe company behind when you retire.

Post-Course Assessment

To show that you are ready to lead, you must pass these final tests.

• The Big Future Project: You will write a step by step plan for what your company must do by the year 2030 to stay rich and relevant.
• The Hard Choice Test: You will read a story about a failing company. You must pick how to save it and explain your choice to the teacher.
• Habit Check Two: You will take the first quiz again to see if you fixed your bad thinking habits.
• Oral Talk: You will stand up in front of the class and explain your future vision simply and clearly.

Lessons Learned

When you are done with this class, we hope you carry these simple truths with you every day.

The future is not a straight line. You cannot just draw a line from yesterday to tomorrow. Things change fast. You must be ready to turn the wheel of your company when the road turns.

Doing nothing is a choice. Some leaders get scared and decide to wait and see what happens. Waiting is a choice. It is usually the worst choice. The market will move past you while you stand still.

Listen to the quiet voices. The best ideas about the future usually do not come from the loudest person in the room. They come from the quiet workers who actually watch the customers. You must learn to listen to them.

Be ready to be wrong. Even the best leaders make bad choices. The secret is knowing when you are wrong and fixing it very fast. A bad choice only ruins a company if the leader refuses to change their mind.

Action beats a perfect plan.You will never have every single fact you want. If you wait for the perfect plan, you will wait forever. Make the best choice you can with the facts you have, and then get to work.