In "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland," Alice comes to a ‘T’ in the road and must decide which way to turn in her quest to find the Red Queen. Stymied by indecision, she turns to the Cheshire cat in the tree behind her and asks, “Which way should I go?
The cat replies quite logically, “Well, that depends where you’re going.”
Alice retorts, “But I don’t know where I’m going,” to which the cat replies,
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go, does it?”
I don’t recommend this particular approach as a leadership strategy — it's not particularly inspiring. The approach I do recommend, however, is what I call the ‘Alan Kay Approach.’ Alan Kay was a Silicon Valley pioneer and visionary, credited with (among other things) inventing the laptop computer. During a speech a few years ago, he made this observation: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” This quote lies at the heart of the reverse engineering process.
In reverse engineering the future, we start in the future and reverse-engineer our way back to the present, identifying all the obstacles and roadblocks that will get in our way, so that we can deal with them before they show up. Unlike traditional scenario planning, which starts with objectives and action plans and works toward the desired vision of the future, this process begins with a detailed vision and ends by defining the actions that will make it achievable.
This is one of the hardest steps in the process: getting participants to agree to suspend reality for a bit as they design the desired future. As humans, we tend to think in terms of ‘what is,’ but have a hard time dealing with ‘what could be.’ Unfortunately, it’s the latter that is the domain of the reverse-engineered future.
Unlike traditional scenario planning techniques that begin at “time zero” and extrapolate into some indeterminate future, this method begins in the future and reverse-engineers back to the present. It’s based on the idea that if we start in the present and go forward, we quickly run into the well-known counterforce, 'That’s not how we do things here,' and everything screeches to a halt. Inertia, otherwise known as the status quo, kicks in.
Change is an ever-present part of competitive business. Without it organizations grow stale, wither, and die a slow and painful death as status quo becomes modus operandi and their relevance seeps away. Peters is correct: change must be embraced if companies are to deal constructively with its impact. However, the process of managing that change is only part of the equation. Change must also be part of the leadership equation. Hence my focus is not on change management, but on change leadership.
