Given the complexity of all environments, Anticipatory Leaders realize that the ability to set the right priorities in place and to mobilize effective change efforts is a given.

Often the needed changes call for a dramatic increase in cross-boundary collaboration and in alignment between organizational levels. For example:

• A global organization’s executives are not aligned on strategic priorities.
• Two organizations have officially merged, but their corporate cultures have not.
• Tensions in the relationships between R&D, manufacturing, and sales lead to declining customer satisfaction and aging products.

Art of the Future’s Change Management services are directed toward fundamental questions:

• How should change be undertaken?
• How should it be communicated? 
• How do people facing the need to change pull together in a spirit of real collaboration?
• How can organizational change be made in way that stick?

Every community—social, organizational, virtual—has a wealth of creativity, ideas, energy and talent.  The diversity of backgrounds, values, thinking and interests within a community creates a rich texture.  However, that very diversity can also make it difficult to take unified action.  Smart, committed and well-intended people pulling in different directions can stymie change.  Community organizers get burned out and disengage. Social progress stalls while social ills persist.

Art of the Future’s knows how to focus the attention of the creative people on what it takes to create a Thriving Community.

The conversation between organizational decision-makers and opinion leaders builds upon initial actions.  No matter how good an initial set of ideas might be, conditions are constantly changing. An organization's  strategic conversation must stay current by monitoring, revisiting, and revising approaches in light of inevitable dynamic evolution.  New technologies, for example, will affect the status quo and sometimes make it obsolete.   Competitor actions and reactions will create the need for continuous assessment.  Once the dialog has been convened, it will establish a forum and a process to anticipate change, prepare appropriate responses, and to be able to implement effective solutions in a timely, effective manner.    In the normal course of daily business, the importance of functions being and staying aligned is often neglected.  We will keep the focus on establishing and maintaining this critical dialog.

The composition of the emerging workforce is morphing at hyperspeed. Every day new research and reports demonstrate that the workplace encompasses people from more and more different on the basis of:

• Race, Ethnicity and Religion
• Age
• Sexual Orientations
• National Origin and Language
• Social and Economic Class
• Politics

And this is just the beginning list!

Every organizational culture has its own distinctive perspective on matters such as:

• Personal freedom, i.e., how much individualism workers can and should express
• Diversity, i.e., how many different activities the organization ought to engage in and how people, place and technology should be integrated to accomplish those jobs
• Agreement, i.e., how passionately committed people ought to be to the goals of the organization
• Commonality, i.e., how much information, knowledge and ways of behaving everyone in the organization should know and share.

Organizational expectations on these topics frequently don’t match up with those held by the individuals and groups who make up the workforce. 

Art of the Futures Cultural Dynamic services make it easier for Anticipatory Leaders to understand cultural dynamics and integrate them into action plans that enjoy wide support.

A true vision puts an organization’s highest aspirations into words, sounds, and pictures.   It articulates an organizational purpose that makes sense within the context of the opportunities and threats which exist in an organization’s environment.  A clear and stirring vision inspires heroic action.   A workforce that knows what it’s trying to do and why it’s important to do it will always be more effective over time than one that is being manipulated, monitored and micro-managed.  A powerful image of a real purpose galvanizes the organizational learning system. People and organizations that have a vision are more likely to achieve it.

A mission statement creates a specific “vessel” for the positive energy of a stirring vision.  When John Kennedy called for a manned trip to the Moon, he gave America a target for its adventurous, courageous, exploratory, scientific, pragmatic and competitive spirit.  NASA has embodied an aspect of America’s vision of itself.

Art of the Future’s programs for Envisioning the Future provides a structured approach to clients that want to articulate a unifying organizational vision and a focused mission.  Participants come away from this work excited by their own sense of purpose and possibilities.  They know how to champion their vision throughout their organizational system.  They have a plan of action that can be monitored and assessed over time. 

These future focused programs support the aspirations of anticipatory leaders. 

Strategic planning frequently call upon organizational leaders to change the way things have been done in a dramatic way.  Gaining greater insight into the future may demand significant changes, both personally and organizationally. The executive who receives Art of the Future’s coaching has a "teammate" to help him or her to address difficult or unfamiliar situations created with greater confidence, effectiveness, and mastery. Executive coaching creates an intimate connection that provides the person being coached with special strength, insight and wisdom.  An effective executive coaching relationship is a collaborative learning experience that involves openness and reflection on the part of both the client and the coach. 

Art of the Future’s coaching is not psychotherapy.  It is not an analysis of present-day issues through the lens of a person's early developmental experiences or through the evolution of an individual's unconscious. Our coaching focuses on a client's current reality and on organizational goals. It helps people map the social system that they are part of. That analytical/reflective process allows one to understand how one affects a system and how one is, in turn, affected by it. Perhaps most importantly, executive coaching encourages clients to look into what they are doing that might be contributing to any problems they are facing and what they could be doing to approach systemic conditions more effectively. Executive coaching helps them to develop the courage to make stretches outside the "comfort zone."

The need for true learning conversations is present across all range of endeavors.  Anticipatory Leaders have to attract the best and most forthright thinking across a range of perspectives.  Community builders need participation from many stakeholder groups.  Workplace strategy requires frank and open discussion across functional lines to integrate the best ideas.

Toward this end, Art of the Future offers both direct facilitation of important conversations and facilitation training. 

Over 90% of all American enterprises are family controlled, including something like 40% of the Fortune 1000 corporations. The percentage is even higher in other societies. 

Family businesses have given many Anticipatory Leaders a platform for greatness.  Family businesses have frequently been the birthing grounds for noble experimentation in workplace strategy, great innovative thinking and support for community development.  Family controlled firms are less susceptible to the short term thinking that can plague public firms having to show speculative investors improved profitability every quarter. 

On the other hand, family businesses are often havens for cronyism and unprofessional behavior.  Successful family enterprises must weave together a delicate knitting of diverse interests.  Those who own the business may not have the same economic objectives as those who manage it; and those who manage it may not be aligned with the emotional needs and the traditions of the families affected by the fortunes of the firm.  These matters become especially acute when power is shifting from one generation to the next.

Art of the Future has extensive experience in helping progressive family controlled firms analyze and choose between future options.

Creating a sense of confidence and hope when facing a risky future is one of the key ingredients of leadership. Art of the Future’s entire portfolio of learning experiences can make a practical contribution to those who want to become skillful anticipatory leaders. 

For example, our executive coaching services draw on a range of perspectives for exercising leadership, such as Lee Bolman and Terry Deal’s “four frames:”

Structural, i.e., how goals, role, rules and formal organizational relationships can be used to mobilize desired behavior

Relational, i.e., drawing on the power of interpersonal skills to become a highly credible leader

Political, i.e., understanding and using the truth that all situations have community aspect and that political and power dynamics exists in all communities

Cultural, i.e., knowing how to take advantage of the dramaturgic, symbolic, and value-laden features of every situation to shape expectations and performance

Our Systems Thinking workshop contribute to the ability of participants to see the causal connections shaping their environments and our Structural Dynamics workshop demonstrates how to use that insight to map out a comprehensive landscape of future possibilities. 

Our approach is tailored to the leader’s unique set of challenges, experience, and aspirations. 

Organization Development is a capacity building process by which organizations become better able to act on the robust strategies suggested by the scenario planning process.   All organizations are used to doing things in a particular fashion, and it can be very challenging to change existing behaviors, especially when those behaviors have had positive results. 

Organizations of all types must be persistently resilient, creative and innovative as they face pitiless turbulence and rapidly accelerating change in their environments.  However, the power dynamics of organizational life frequently thwart their ability to act and react with sufficient agility.

Every organization and every social system has a power structure.  Some individuals and teams are more influential than others.  Some use their power in ways that make them more rigid, and others use it in ways that make their organizations more nimble. Some organizations incline toward a command and control power structure while others foster distributed leadership.  Too much hierarchy and power politics can result in organizational paralysis.  By using power to build partnership and organizational learning, the prospect of success in today’s hyper-complex environment is vastly increased.

Art of the Future’s workshops and consulting services that focus on power dynamics help Anticipatory Leaders, Community Builders and Workplace Strategists mobilize energies toward the positive power that brings about needed growth rather than preventing it.

Ethnographic Study: Impact of Technology on Work and the Work Environment

• To detect important scientific, social, technical, economic, educational and ecological factors, events, interactions and advances
• Identify the nature and significance of such events as they form patterns and cause & effect structures
• Determine planning and action choices guided by continuous awareness and evaluation of events
• Alert key players to trends which are converging, diverging, speeding up, slowing down or dynamically resonating

Scenario Analysis takes a structured approach to testing strategic actions we may take in the present against possible future developments and assessing the outcomes. It is a creative and engrossing way to turn raw information into stories that contain knowledge and demonstrate foresight. Scenario Analysis would help any organization facing:

• major strategic decisions, e.g., a merger
• long term planning choices, e.g., new product lines
• large capital investments in plant, real estate and/or equipment
• a high level of uncertainty in the business environment  e.g., ambiguities in the regulatory environment
• tension in an executive team over strategic direction
• the anxiety people experience when a situation feels chaotic or out-of-control
  

• discover key leverage points to influence events
• recognize critical events as they unfold
• prepare for both your preferred future and others that are equally plausible

Strategic Planning is a catchall term for describing a range of methods used to discover and execute steps that guide the totality of an organization’s behavior. 

Art of the Future concentrates on the imaginative front end of the strategic planning process while providing clients with the insight and information they need to start implementing the action steps that come out of a useful creative process. 

Drawing on the design sensibilities of artistic thinking, Art of the Future’s strategic planning workshops and consultation provide Anticipatory Leaders with a distinctive advantage over others who don’t know how to look as deeply at the forces shaping a competitive environment.

The interests of labor and those of capital are frequently at odds.  Both workers and those who they perform services have legitimate interests, but they are not the same.  Workers are often affected by the decisions of managers and owners whose thinking they exert little control over.  On the other hand, managers and owners want to be able to move quickly to take advantage of opportunities and defend against threats shaping up in organizational environments without being slowed down by working through the interests and concerns of the workforce.  Workers want to know how they will get health care and managers don’t want to be saddled with labor costs competitors don’t pay.  Both camps wield power and both need each other.

Art of the Future has experience in helping Anticipatory Leaders in both management and labor understand the forces driving their differences.  New insights will support a search for pathways toward collaboration and partnership that don’t violate their basic values or ask them to give up their primary objectives.

Technology, globalization, and lifestyle are impacting how, when and where we work.  People, place, process, and policies must be aligned to optimize performance and to attract and keep key talent.  Beyond the objective of producing desired results, a workplace strategy that results in a life sustaining, rather than a life draining, environment is a worthy end in and of itself.  Increasingly, empowered people are demanding an engaging working environment, and they deserve it.  This trend is ever more pronounced with educated young workers used to very high levels of self-regulation.

Art of the Future can help you determine the right balance for your organization between...

• thinking and collaborative space
• shared and dedicated offices
• centralized and disbursed facilities
• remote work and physical presence

We can work with you to tailor the work environment to....

• Support work methods critical to success
• Communicate culture and values
• Set investment priorities based on gains in productivity, satisfaction and retention
• Identify opportunities for greatest impact

There are many occasions where organizations want to hold an event that will anticipate the future and mobilize positive energy. The assumption of organizational leadership by someone with a new vision, addressing some pressing problem such as the need to rebuild an organization after downsizing, or initiating an important conversation about a controversial new strategic direction are all examples of occasions where custom designed conference might make sense. Frequently, there is no pre-existing design for such a meeting, and a powerful experience has to be designed from scratch or put together using existing modules in a new way.

While many of Art of the Future’s existing workshop offering address the needs of Anticipatory Leaders, Community Builders and Workplace Strategists, we can design programs to meet your specifications both drawing upon existing proven design ingredients and inventing new components based on the distinctive needs of the situation.