Beyond its danger as an infectious agent, COVID-19 has torn apart our plans for the future. It has laid waste to our projections for what we thought would be possible for 2020. Dr. Benjamin Akande will outline the forces that have the most disruptive power for shaping an organization’s future relevance and what you can do to turn constraints into possibilities.

Join us for a free one-hour webinar on May 7th at Noon Central.

This webinar will be largely interactive and feature a lot of Q&A. So come prepared with questions for a global economist and with the expectation that you will be provoked.

Dr. Akande, a Nigerian-American citizen is a respected economist, scholar and global consultant to Fortune 500 companies and institutions in the higher education space in the areas of strategy, leadership development, corporate responsibility and market positioning. He served as a director of Ralcorp Holdings, Inc., a $5 billion publicly traded manufacturer of high-quality private food labels, including Post, and has consulted for corporations such as Anheuser-Busch, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Voith, SeaWorld, and many others. 

With the experience to recognize when to take calculated risks and the confidence to make tough business decisions, Dr. Akande believes that the future belongs to those who can see it. He and his wife, Bola, a pharmacist and entrepreneur, have three adult daughters.

Register for the webinar here.

As of this writing, we are nearing one million cases of COVID-19 globally. And we are told this is only the beginning. The global pandemic has shaken our public health systems, our collective sanities, our businesses, our livelihoods, and our identities. Already, we are running out of words for “unprecedented.” Who could have foreseen this level of crisis and its attendant uncertainty?

It turns out that you could have. Or, at the very least, you can, today, adapt a mindset for interpreting and understanding the unknown. For decades, there has been a discipline that helps leaders to have courage even in the midst of volatile circumstances. That discipline is strategic foresight.

Join us for a conversation with accomplished futurist Jake Dunagan, director at the Institute for the Future. Through his practice of design futures, Dungan has helped leaders of organizations and communities to experience simulated alternative future realities. Through experiential futures, leaders uncover new insights, create flexible strategies, and build teams that are better adapted for change.

Join us for a free one-hour webinar on April 8 at noon CDT.

The webinar will also feature a Q&A section during which you can ask a futurist, well, anything you have always wanted to ask a futurist.

Everything is changing. Every. Single. Thing. At. Every. Moment.

And if you are a leader, more people are looking to you for answers. All of this is happening in the context of your own life, health, and family facing uncertainty. What are we to do to lead in these times? 

We asked Matthew Porter, CEO of Invisibly, to share how he remains courageous in the face of a global pandemic. Porter is an accomplished tech entrepreneur who sold his first company, Contegix, in 2016. He is a deeply devoted husband to his wife who works in healthcare and a father of three. Porter is an ultramarathoner who competes in 100-mile events despite a multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis five years ago.

Join us for a free one-hour webinar, March 25 at 10 AM Central.

When Columbus arrived on the coast of what would become the West Indies, the first peoples completely ignored his crew. Ostensibly, this is due to the ships being so large and so foreign to any experiences that the native people had, that they could not perceive of what was happening. The ships were invisible. It was not until the explorers approached the shore in longboats that the natives would react with fear and weapons.

Depending on which motivational facilitator is presenting, sometimes the explorer is Magellan or Captain Cook. Sometimes the location is Australia or South America. The story, it turns out, is apocryphal. It is, at best, an embellishment intended to carry the weight of metaphor.

Ships: Obvious stuff you cannot see.

Explorers: People who have mastery of the stuff.

Native People: You.

The point that the motivational speaker attempts to make is that our consciousness is so filtered that we sometimes miss what is obvious or right in front of us. And that you, listener, should wake up to new realities because the explorers are coming to take your native land. Insert artificial intelligence, autonomous cars, robots, holograms, etc.

That is an excellent life lesson. However, two things are troubling about the account and the telling of it as such. One is that it is impossible to know if the native people could not “see” the ships. That is, we do not have an account from the native perspective on what was happening. The second troubling fact builds on that point: the scenario makes the native (and the listener of the story) out to be deluded or, at best, incompetent.

Since it is impossible to know if the native people saw the ships, a more plausible explanation for their behavior may be that they were busy. They were working to survive. They ignored anything that did not pose an immediate threat.

That feeling — being ignored — likely feels familiar. Because if you are a person of vision, and the sort of leader who has the wherewithal to construct mighty ships, you may have felt the sting of being either ignored or attacked when you reached the shore.

Since this metaphor has not been completely beaten to death, here is the lesson: if you are seeking to do anything important in this life, you are likely to be traveling into uncharted waters. And just because you have not gone there before does not mean that there are not already hordes of people who are working there in their day-to-day survival. And your survival in that world depends upon your ability to have empathy for their lives, their mental models and their needs. Your ship impresses no one. They must know first that you care for them. So perhaps the most fitting description would be:

Ships: Your awesome idea that everyone ignores right now.

Explorers: You

Native People: The people with whom you must build trust and empathy if you hope that they will care about your ideas and not destroy you on the shore.

Challenge questions: How willing are you to first seek out and understand your audiences (internal and external) before becoming enamored with your ideas? What steps can you take to learn the mental models of the audiences that you try to reach? (Note: Here are some resources if it seems like your people just “don’t get it.”)

Also, if you are just morbidly curious about the roots of the story, this is the best account I can find.

It’s only February, and, if you are like most people, you have given up on your New Year’s resolutions. For most of us, this is a perennial problem. About 30 days into the year, there are no more keto meals or yoga classes. The canonized works of great literature have already started to gather dust.

Why do we do this?

It turns out that there is science to it. Our brains are actually optimized to prefer our present-day selves over ourselves in the future. When we work to visualize our future selves, our brains, according to fMRI scanning, actually behave as though we are visualizing a stranger. More pointedly, a stranger we do not trust.

And this has consequences.

It is why we will take short-term gains over long-term implications. It is why we will optimize for immediate payoffs over more audacious achievement that require time to develop.

It turns out that there is something that can be done about this. We can build empathy and get to know our future selves. You can employ proven strategies that will allow you to increase your foresight intelligence and offer you a mindset that can remain more focused on your long-term vision.

If you are finding that you are stuck with certain personal, career or business goals or if you would like to uncover what more could be possible, Bigwidesky is offering a brief workshop on March 4 from 8:30 AM to 10 AM at our offices (2 North Meramec, St. Louis, MO 63105).

From his point-of-view in the kitchen, Frank McGinty saw the looks on peoples’ faces around the table. And from that moment on, he was hooked. 

What he saw was unadulterated joy and genuine conviviality. The simple food that he had concocted and made especially for the diners had been a catalyst for shaping a community and a meaningful experience. And this was something that he had intuited. Something that would never leave him to this day. 

Frank is now the director of sales and marketing for Kaldi’s coffee. And he has taken the fundamental experience that he saw from his days in the kitchen to a larger question of the role of a coffee brand in the lives of the humans that touch that brand. 

And we are using Frank’s story, and stories like his, to uncover the ways in which organizations have the potential to place humans at the center of their design decisions. What would happen if what drove our efforts was a genuine desire to serve complex human needs?  

The answer to what is possible is in our series: Cloudbreaks. They are named as such because they can act as a kind of inspiration for leaders for whom off-the-shelf business solutions are no longer satisfying. They are for you if you are a person who is working every day to make your business, organization or community more human.  

I mean that sincerely. It is likely that you are facing what feels like a big decision or something too complex. And what you would like right now is some certainty.

Another layer of my sympathy has to do with the fact that I do not have any certainty for you. And the even worse news is that attempts to create some future certainty won’t help you either. And the reason that I know this is that we have tried many times before.

By the year 2050, over 40 percent of Americans believe that Jesus will reappear in human form. This finding comes from a recent Pew Research Center study. Surely 50 million Americans can’t be wrong. However, they are just the latest in our history of predicting this event.

We do it anyway, though, because what we desire is some form of certainty. Our default setting compels us to create images of a future we would prefer. And those images are repeatedly not true.

But there is good news: There exist useful frameworks for getting to know the future and for taking back some of the agency on the shaping of the images you and your organization holds of the future.

It begins by dropping the need to predict a particular future and instead understanding that the future is alive in your present-day decision making. The future is not a place on the horizon at which we arrive. The future is alive inside of you and your organization at the level of (generally unconscious) images.

“The future cannot be predicted because the future does not exist.” — James Dator

To make those images more visible and to create alignment on taking agency and shaping futures is the work of foresight. And, it turns out, that organizations that can inspire and cultivate foresight as a mindset and practice are more capable of facing uncertainty.

During a foresight webinar, we walked viewers through the steps to creating alternative scenarios of the future based on present-day inflection points. If you are in the mode of needing to know what more is possible, check out the step-by-step instructions we outlined on creating simulated future realities.

Remember ten years ago when you had that one friend who was convinced the government was spying on him? Leaning into the cafe table, he would whisper that national security was listening to everyone’s phone conversations. “Crazy,” you thought. “Why would the government be interested in anything I’m up to?” You tried your best to comfort your obviously disillusioned friend. Perhaps you even suggested a professional to help him get in touch with reality.

The trouble is that he was not delusional at all. It turns out the National Security Agency is listening to your phone. That crazy idea? Not crazy. Reality these days has become a series of accepting the once fringe as mainstream. And while this is evident to a large extent in our national political and social discourse, it is true also in your business.

In 2007, Amazon was still understood as a book retailer. Fast forward to today and it is a retail, technology and logistics superpower that is likely going to somehow take over your industry. The entire business world, your company included, is knit into our accelerated culture. The diffusion of innovations is growing at an exponential rate. If you look back over the last ten years in your company, you can likely see that what once was only a distant trend is now an integral part of your daily life. It is enough to make you feel crazy.

Both the good news and the bad news is that you’re not crazy. Things are accelerating at a rate that we could not predict. And that has, in turn, increased the chances that seemingly unlikely realities are happening.

The pain of this acceleration is felt acutely when you are trying to plan for your next year. Where will our biggest opportunities be? What kind of vision ought we set forward? How do we look forward together? These questions are exceedingly difficult when things feel uncertain and crazy.

Here is better news: Things have always been and will always be crazy. The future has never been certain. But you can find a fresh approach to looking forward with your team if you can incorporate ways to think like futurists.

One way to begin:

This is not an attempt to predict the future. Don’t try that. Vision is less about predicting the future and more about your ability to articulate multiple futures. This allows your organization to have the flexibility to meet the new crazy realities.