Director’s Corner | The Case for Strategic Insight

No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter how important you are, you have a common predicament with the rest of humanity. Like it or not, you are stuck on a round chunk of rock nearly 8,000 miles wide spinning at a rate of 1,040 miles each hour, revolving around the sun at more than 66,000 miles per hour. The solar system around our planet is nestled in an outer arm of the Milky Way galaxy, spinning at the rate of about 560,000 miles per hour. On top of all that, the galaxy itself is moving through space at more than 660,000 miles per hour. Think about it. If you feel at all out of balance, you have one very persuasive excuse.

However, while we may not be able to alter the course of the planet, we can transform the course of our own futures here. It is inexcusable, therefore, that we are just as oblivious to the forces shaping our environment here at home. You’d think after a few thousand years on this planet, we’d have a better lock on where things are going. That we would have a game plan for addressing all, or at least some, of the big trends—political, social, economic, environmental, etc.--playing themselves out on the surface of this massive rock on which we find ourselves. But we don’t. Not even close. That’s the bad news.

Fact is, the vast majority of people on this planet are not connected with their strategic future. They are hostage to the short term, mired in pigeon-holed and compartmentalized thinking, de-linked with anticipatory thought, unable to carry out preemptive action, disinterested in developments outside their immediate sphere, and monopolized by tactical rather than strategic concerns. Not a pretty picture. Especially when we remember how quickly the world around us is changing.

The challenge before us all is to lift our sights, to think about the longer-range trends at world across the world, and to figure out how we as individuals, as members of families and communities, as workers in companies and as citizens of cities, states and countries need to alter our trajectories into the future. The challenge is to position ourselves to prosper in a world that will be fundamentally different in the years to come. The challenge is to connect with our strategic future.

In a nutshell, addressing our “strategic future” means not only taking charge of our own lives but also laying a solid foundation for generations to come. It means weighing longer-term challenges together with the inevitable near-term crises we face. And it means finding ways to escape from the gravity of the short term so that our approaches are proactive rather than reactive in nature. Abraham Lincoln, a truly strategic thinker, put it this way in 1862: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.”

What a supreme irony that when leaders nowadays have more information available to them than ever before, they are falling short. If these trends persist, as we can expect them to, or if they even intensify, visionary leaders, real leaders who look at or beyond the horizon, may be destined for the endangered species list.

To what extent are you a strategic leader? I’d be surprised if you are not already predisposed to this kind of thinking. Why? Because thinking about global strategic trends implies that you can think beyond the next episode of American Idol or Boston Legal. It implies that you can look beyond phenomena that hold hostage our media like the recent Imus controversy. And it shows you recognize that continued success depends on how well you can read the trends--that thinking about the future is not an option.

There can be no doubt that we are bound both for the future and by the future. It falls on all of us to engage in a way that that allows us to foreordain the circumstances we want to encounter. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, wrote “as for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it..”