Interruptions. Unforeseen events. wrong strategies. All this is possible for business and also for careers. In 2020, we don’t have to look far into the past to see how the best business and career plans can go awry due to a surprising and unforeseen event. We could conclude, such is life. No one ever guaranteed us long-term certainty. This is true. Unforeseen and unforeseen obstacles are part of life’s turmoil, but that doesn’t mean we can’t proactively prepare for sudden changes and develop an agility that can result in competitive advantage and success despite disruptions.
Many of us still operate with a model that sees the hardest parts of running a career first as determining which career path to follow, followed by education and training, landing the great job, keeping the job, and keeping up with best practices. Despite the importance of these features, I would recommend adding at least one more: improving your ability to predict where your career will go and what dangers may ambush your planning.
With regard to our careers, it is wise to allocate time and energy to a style of future planning that incorporates intentional forecasting of trends and movements that carry the potential for threat and disruption. Although no one can definitively predict the future, by practicing building projections over time, we can hone our ability to make predictions more accurately, test our hypotheses, and dig deeper and deeper into what makes our professions tick. Fine-tuning our forecasting skills could be the difference between thriving or losing in today’s turbulent economy.
Preparing for the future requires from the beginning a change in attitude and a challenge to our assumptions. Here are some basic guesses that I encourage you to shake off. Good times don’t last forever. Luck can only take you so far. The world is more dynamic than static. With that said, change the way you plan for tomorrow. Future planning should not be limited to evaluating the present and then looking ahead. Rather, determine as best you can the most likely future perception and plan backwards from there.
Interpreting the future is a matter of creating a vision. This vision shows greater resolution the deeper our knowledge of our profession, including market and customer trends. Vision is not certainty, but an estimate of what is possible. The more we know, the closer we come to refining our analysis. Therefore, structured continuous learning is the central activity to practice. By looking at all angles of our profession, including the influences and upheavals that affect our lines of work along with the practice of making and revising our predictions, we better prepare for the forecast. Opportunities will always be out there. Become your own agent of change and a magnet to locate these possibilities.
Smart organizations implement a strategic method known as scenario planning. It involves forecasting and building a high degree of flexibility into long-term planning. Scenario planning assumes that adaptation is necessary for survival. The same mentality applies to our races. In general, this process involves merging known facts about the future, such as demographics, geographic constraints, cultural characteristics, government structures, etc. with social, economic, political, technical and environmental trends. From this mixture we can formulate simulations that work as prototypes of strategies. For example, is it feasible to think that weather-related shocks could manifest themselves in novel ways over the next three decades and cause potentially sudden market fluctuations? Are you confident that the United States has learned its lesson about pandemic preparedness and is ready for the next such attack?
Developing a heuristic approach to prepare for uncertainty may very well be the system needed to better weather whatever the future holds next.
