S+B reports onThe Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan.
In spite of the tired marketing gimmick of ‘X things to do to achieve Y’, the book’s basic premise is sound. Define the ‘default future’ for your organization – the future that is coming towards you, given the current circumstances and plans and given likely external events. Then ‘re-write’ an improved future, work back to what has to happen to bring that future about, then get everyone clear on bringing that better future about.
Surely this has always been the fundamental task of strategic management? Problem until now has been that we have had no decent tools for describing either the default or improved future, or how strategic choices and decisions link to those futures [which I humbly submit is precisely what strategy dynamics does].
Just a quick note to say that this sounds very similar to Russell Ackoff’s backwards planning from a future idealized state.
finereach