Many Business leaders spend an inordinate amount of time planning for the future or reacting to present circumstances.
Much of their final thinking is assumption-based, drawn from their personal experiences, or wishful thinking that flows not from the deep investigative analysis but from their own personal preconceptions. Many organisations, as they evaluate their current business in order to set strategies for the future, seek the assistance, advice and comfort of industry experts to help them on their transformational journey. However, the deficiency in this strategy is that industry experts apply industry-biased thinking, which merely results in a continuation of current practices in a more efficient manner, or, at best incremental change that does not deliver the outcomes they are searching for.
Our thinking as leaders is often shaped by extending the past experience that we have had or the business has had into the future, or, by others domain expert bias, silo based shaped solutions and the really scaryWe know in many very well researched facts as evident in 2011 blackswan survey of over 200 global business leaders that:
1) Greater than 90% of innovation fails.
2) Greater than 80% of change programmes fail.
3) That many transformational programmes often fail to return the initial investment cost. part, in many cases PowerPoint re-engineering.
We must remember, in many cases we are dealing with highly intelligent people; so the question is how can so many intelligent people get it wrong so often? We have no choice but to keep looking to the future; if we don‟t our business will shrivel and die.
