Seeing The Future By Looking Ahead
A Shockingly Simple Planning Process For Delivering Dramatic Results
Whether you’re managing a major project, leading a division, or playing your part in trying to drive change, there are unfortunately a myriad of reasons why small problems can cause big headaches for some of our most important work.
Over the course of my career, to help counter this reality, I’ve developed a painfully simple - but surprisingly successful - planning approach that has dramatically improved our ability to anticipate issues; allowing the team to adapt our approach, avoid setbacks, and increase our overall success rate.
It’s called The Look Ahead Exercise and here’s how it works
Whether the team was conducting a kickoff meeting for a project, or we were meeting offsite to discuss account planning for a specific client, we would ask the group two simple questions:
“It’s one year from today, we’re back in this room, and this project went to shit. Why? What happened?”
“It’s one year from today, we’re back in this room, and this project was a home run. Why? What happened?”
In both cases, we would brainstorm our answers, jotting down everything we could think of. As the list grew longer, we would crowdsource with the room to determine which threats or opportunities were most realistic, leaving a star next to those that rose to the top.
What we were left with was a clear list of all the reasons this project was either going to be a huge success or a total failure. It’s at this point we followed up with our final two questions:
“What can we do to ensure all the terrible things we just wrote down DON’T happen?”
“What can we do to ensure all the great things we just wrote down DO happen?”
Believe me, I get how simplistic this sounds, but this approach time-and-time again proved incredible valuable, identifying opportunities and roadblocks weeks - and often months - before they appeared.
Here’s why it works:
The vast majority of the time the problems that arise are predictable
Whether it’s trouble with a client, challenges with a technical integration, or an unrealistic project schedule, most of the time good teams are quite capable of seeing and anticipating problems before they arise. The reason we so often don’t isn’t because we can’t see them, but rather that we don’t slow down and give ourselves time to look.
So the next time you’re in a meeting kicking off a big project, consider taking the mic for a moment and leading your team through the incredibly simple Look Ahead Exercise.
You might just be surprised that you actually can see the future, if you just slow down and look ahead.
Editor’s Note
This is the fifth installment of the Kanahoma newsletter. If you like what you read, please feel free to like, comment, or share.
To all who have shared the newsletter previously, please know it means so much. Reengaging with writing, and receiving such a positive response, has been such an unexpected reward.
Until next time,
Seth