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| The Future- How are we preparing for it? |
Each organisation operates at two levels where the future is concerned.There is the budget that tries to keep existing operations on an even keel and can in some circumstances be reduced under pressures from the trade cycle. What is the least spend we need to make to keep going. Not very ambitious I am sure. If there is a future growth strategy then it should be addressed by the question, "What is the necessary funding to produce optimal results from new initiatives". This is a budget for growing and developing your organisation - it needs to be there constantly to assist you in exploiting new opportunities.
The two levels are linked and one may spring from the other, however too often the growth level budget is not taken seriously enough or it is just a simple wish list. We all wish for new exciting developments but there is very often little or no seed funding to push those new agendas forward. This can be frustrating but budgets for new initiatives cannot be built on dreams alone. It is however always important not to lose sight of the dream but still keeping your feet on the ground.
This probably leads me into the proposition that the future will never happen on its own or shouldn't happen on its own. The future requires thoughts and actions and deeds to-day. There are as many if not more risks of doing little or nothing with your organisation than doing something. Perhaps many short \medium term plans overlap into the longer term plan. Planning needs to be effective over a time span of development -- Long range thinking and planning should stop us from always sticking with the products and services we know, just because we know them and they have worked for us in the past.Long range planning and thinking should rescue us from short term decisions about our futures.
Such thoughts lead us into difficult territory, which parts of our organisation should we play down and which should we push? Are we even at this stage at all? The question we all face is not what we should do tomorrow but what should we do right now to be ready for tomorrow's challenges. Do we plan for the future in everything we do today? Probably not but we should try to adopt this approach. As Peter Drucker argued, "We should deal with the futurity of present decisions."
Everyone is always tempted to stick with their core competencies but there is seldom a core competence of innovation. Does your organisation have an innovation section that monitors innovation elsewhere and promotes it within your own organisation? Are there product and service innovation targets which have to be achieved each year? Do we have an annual innovation target as far as products and services are concerned? If we are not innovating we are not preparing for the future with actions we can take to-day.
If we do innovate - let's not do it on the cheap,let's get the resources to achieve this, as relying on existing fully committed resources will probably ensure that innovation will fail and the future will devour us. None of us would wish that to happen.
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