Future-back thinking: The roadmap to effective leadership profiles

Rick: For so many of us today, the whole idea of looking into the future feels impossible because I don’t trust my judgment anymore. So how does that work in today’s environment?

Matt: Part of it is to break out of your “rivers of thinking” and begin to imagine what that future could look like. We’re not in the prediction business, but we certainly can look at some of the changes that are happening, whether they’re global changes like the climate, or they’re organizational changes. And we’re not sure what the future is going to look like, but if it looked like this, what would that mean? Or if it looked like this other thing, what would that mean? If that future were to come true, what is it that we have to do to address it in advance and be sure that we can be ready for it to the degree that we can?

Rick: Help me to understand the bridge between that vision and what ultimately becomes a success profile?

Matt: So “future storming”, the way that we use it, it’s bringing a group of people together to think about future states and to envision what would happen if those things came true. And then we bring it to the individual level and we say, ” what would people need to do differently in order to be successful in those potential futures”?

And that’s where those success profiles come from. They about the existing capabilities that are necessary to run the business as it currently is. And they are also simultaneously about what those capabilities of the future are going to need to be so we can get ahead of some of the issues that may arise over the course of the next, say, 12, 18, 24 months.

A couple of things that you could theoretically think about would be autonomous cars. We know that’s coming. It could be AI, which we know is here and is going to continue to get more complicated and available with agentic AI, and if we combine a couple of those, AI and autonomous cars, what’s the impact of that on the future of delivery services? Car ownership? If our cars are driving themselves, then theoretically they don’t have to be sitting in our garage. They can be out doing other things while we’re working.

So if we can imagine those kinds of things and then say, okay, well, if I’m in a consumer facing business, for example, What’s going to happen to the organization if delivery services are now entirely autonomous? What’s going to happen to the extent to which we can actually interact directly with the consumer if these things are happening autonomously and we don’t actually have a direct connection to our consumers? What’s going to happen to our brand? How do we manage our image?

To bring that back to the individual, you can think about if those things come true, what would happen to the way that we do our work? What happens to the skills that we have to have? What happens to the behaviors that we have to exhibit?

What happens to the mindsets we have to hold in order to be successful in a wildly different paradigm with this future back thinking process and with these success profiles imagine the future and then say, what are the skills and behaviors and mindsets that we will need to have and build in order to address that potential future?

You just, dropped three words skills, behaviors, and mindsets. Can you help me understand how those things show up in a success profile?

The mindsets that we hold they underlie a lot of the ways that we behave. So if you have the mindset that robots are going to take away your job then you may struggle as an individual to figure out your place and the value that you can bring.

Matt: If however, you have the mindset that if in fact, robots or AI or other things are going to change elements of how you do your job, then you can start thinking about, well, if that’s true, what are the things I’m going to have to do differently to continue to add value?

Behaviors, certainly different as well. So if there is a significant shift to the way a marketer needs to think about their job or the way somebody in operations needs to think about supply chain, what do they have to change? What are the new factors that are going to make somebody successful in that job under those new conditions?

And it’s true of skills as well. And in fact, skills are one of the most granular things that we can think about. Building individual skill can become an important element of shifting the way we do our work and the new ways we need to think that will allow us to continue to do the work despite the changes that we know are coming.

Rick: So you now convinced me that by doing this kind of future back thinking, I can create a success profile that I can look through all three of those lenses of mindset, behavior and skills. But now I’m like, I would think by the time I got one of these things written and depending on the size of my organization, you know, pushed it out on Slack or whatever internal, messaging system I use, it’s obsolete because things have changed. How does that work in today’s world?

Matt: Historically we would have redone a success profile or a leadership framework every five or seven years. Clearly that is insufficient at this point because of the rate of change as you’ve described. So we need to do them more often. But there are a couple of things that we need to be thinking about.

One of those is we need to kind of rise above the chaos a little bit in a sense that we don’t want to get too granular in these profiles such that they have to be changed all the time.

So for example, when we think about digital skill, like adding our ability to write prompts in an AI environment. That is a very discreet skill that for some people will be important, but if we think about the capability that sits above that, the capability is really digital savviness to some degree, and then it’s probably also learning agility to some degree.

So in other words, if we’re saying to people, part of what you need to be able to do is have a growth mindset, the willingness to learn new things, and shift when things change, have a sufficient degree of digital savvy that you can go learn those new things and be willing to try them, even though they’re scary.

What you’ve done there is you haven’t created a profile that requires updating every time openAI pushes out a new feature. And that makes it easier for people to connect to those things and update those profiles more like every 18 to 24 months.

Rick: How do I know if I’m right? I think back to my earlier days of being assessed against a competency model and being told that we know this is good because it’s based on research. With this approach, what’s the testing process? How do you prove it right or, say we need to shift here, some of our early assumptions aren’t necessarily what we thought.

Matt: There’s been a lot of amazing work on competency modeling and leadership frameworks for 50 years. And the classic competency model that is a huge library of competencies from which somebody can choose what is required for a particular role and is research based has historically been very successful and effective.

At BTS we started thinking about a shift in that approach about 10 years ago when we created what we call our “Great framework”. And the idea is rather than picking from a competency library that contains what is imagined to be every competency and behavior that could possibly be demonstrated by a leader.

What we really want to do is talk to people in the business and ask them, “what do your best people do?” And give them an opportunity to own the authorship of these models. They already know what their best people are doing in the organization. So we learn a lot about the strategy, about the culture by talking to those folks. And we also, we say authorship is ownership. so that when we turn around that profile, it is in language that resonates with them and it’s used by the business much more easily.

You asked a question about how we know we’re right. We do have to hypothesize. We do have to test and learn. We work with hundreds of companies around the world, and we know anecdotally a lot about what is making organizations successful.

But by using a future-back thinking approach, we can continually look out to the future and think what’s likely to change, what’s going to happen to this organization, what’s going to happen to the industry and then continue to bring it back and iterate. It’s not so much about being right as it is about trying what we create and then tweaking it to get it a little bit closer to what is necessary for that organization’s success.

One example is a consumer facing organization that is experiencing a total shift in consumer expectations. And that has to do with a whole variety of things. It’s speed to delivery, it’s different kinds of quality, it’s different kinds of interaction with the brand. It’s different kinds of interaction with employees.

So this organization started thinking about how they can brand themselves effectively. How they needed to interact with our consumer in new ways. When a consumer walks into a store, for example, and they’re greeted by an employee, historically, they have one kind of experience. When they walk into a store and they’re greeted by a kiosk, they have a completely different experience.

And the impact of that on the organization is really significant because it means that they can’t touch the consumer in the same way. They have to think about how to build different kinds of relationships and they needed to ask themselves what that future interaction with the consumer was going to look like, what that store of the future was going to look like.

And so we imagined a variety of possible futures where there’s absolutely no interaction with the consumer in the store, for example. And what would that mean? How would the consumer connect to the brand? What would happen to store employees if they weren’t interacting directly with the consumer? What value could they continue to bring? And of course there’s value that they can continue to bring even if the job changes. There are other things that they can do to stay connected to their consumers .

And that’s just an example. It’s not necessarily where this organization is going to go, but it’s a way of thinking about the skills and the behaviors that are going to be necessary for the future and how those mindsets have to change if those things come true.

I always think about our listeners out there that may not have the positional power to affect an enterprise-wide change, like what we’re talking about today. What are some things that they can go do to make a difference?

Have a growth mindset. Recognize that there is a remarkable pace of change and we are all going to be faced with it all the time and we have to learn to pivot.

Matt: At a broader level, start imagining what those futures might look like. There are lots of resources out there to go learn about global change, organizational change, changes to business, changes to technology. So if you can think out toward that future, without necessarily having to go through a series of exercises that we lead you through, it will at least give you a chance to shift how you’re thinking about the world of work and how you think about what you may need to do differently.

And if you can bring that growth mindset and that future-forward thinking to conversations that you’re having with people in the organization it’s a starting point.

Rick: That’s really great advice. Well, thank you so much, my friend. Great hearing about some of the fun you’re out there having in the world. And, look forward to chatting more soon.

Matt: Thanks Rick. It’s always a pleasure.

Rick: Thanks for joining me today. It’s always a pleasure to bring to you our fearless thinkers. If you’d like to stay up to date, please subscribe. Bios for our guests and links to relevant content are always listed in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch, please visit us at bts. com. And thanks so much for listening.