Strategic Foresight with Wilson Wong

Jacqueline Conway  00:00

The organizational peak is a perilous environment. It’s more complex and challenging than anything that’s gone before, and as a consequence, both executive tenure and corporate longevity are decreasing to survive and thrive at the perilous peak, executive leaders need to balance their functional leadership, a focus on execution with enterprise leadership that is ensuring the organization adapts in our new world. That’s what we’ll be exploring in the advanced executive leadership podcast. Welcome. I’m your host. Jacqueline Conway. I’m the Founder and Managing Director of Walden Croft, a consulting practice dedicated to helping executives and executive teams anticipate, navigate and lead at the perilous peak. Hello. In this episode, I’m joined by Dr Wilson Wong, Director of insight and futures at Wong at work, and we delve into futures and foresight, how organizations can anticipate disruption, navigate uncertainty, and strategically plan for the long term. Wilson shares fascinating insights from his 20 plus years of futures work, including real world examples like Shell scenario planning and shifts in the global energy market, we explore why leaders must step back to think critically amidst short term pressures, and how tools like scenario planning can uncover risks and opportunities that might be hiding in plain sight. Let’s dive in.

Wilson Wong  01:46

I’m Dr Wilson Wong, and I’m the director of insight and features at Wong on work. It’s an organization that looks at human capital and explores how your human capital can be developed in a sustainable way across a period of time that’s shorter than than a year. So hence this conversation about futures, because I’ve been doing futures work now for over 20 years, and the research that I do in this space has been mainly about talent and how human capital is deployed and developed so that organizations can access a talent pipeline to meet their Strategic Workforce Plan successfully. Okay,

Jacqueline Conway  02:42

and guess I’m really curious as to how he got into this work. I mean, what has, what has the journey been that’s led you to do this work here and

Wilson Wong  02:54

now? Okay, so I was first introduced to futures work when I was, I suppose, a fairly middle, Junior ranking civil servant. And we were approached to look at scenario planning as a kind of tool for, oh, I’ll just go back a little bit so, so we were approached by policy makers to see how we could use some of the future tools to help in policy development. And some of the work that we were looking at was like back casting to see if we had say, I don’t know, 15 year technology plan in biotech. How would we look at some of the key milestones and the supporting regulations and policies leading up to this kind of 15 year plan? And fingers crossed, if governments don’t change too often, we probably can get somewhere and say we’ve successfully met 20% of our goals. So that was that was my introduction. And we used shell because of their reputation in scenario planning, and I was the one who coordinated all the workshops for the civil servants, and in the process, was heavily exposed to the methodology, the pitfalls, the stories and the kind of technical requirements to do futures and foresight work well and and how shell themselves used their scenarios to inform their long term investment.

Jacqueline Conway  04:45

So you’ve been doing that work since, when you think about then its impact on policy work? Do you see that? Do you see that sort of alive and well or not so much?

Wilson Wong  04:58

I think it absent. Those one of the things about foresight work is that one you need a fairly sensitized, educated audience. And I think in the UK, the Civil Service has had its golden era of foresight work. I mean, it started very much, I think, under the Blair administration, and it’s ebbed and flowed since then. Now it sits in in the government science office, and there is quite a lot of capability being built or rebuilt within the civil service to look at how futures work and inform transportation policy, how it can inform policy on protecting the natural environment from invasive species and climate change. It’s encouraging to see some of this work being done, and that was sponsored by the late Jeremy Hayward, the cabinet secretary who had a personal and professional interest in futures and foresight work and challenged the various government departments to use some of the methodologies to help them think, really, I think There’s been a tension in that the strength of futures and foresight work is helping people to build their thinking muscles before they make kind of solutions out of out of the data that they have. And sometimes it’s done very well, because they have the space to think and scope and explore and test ideas out, and sometimes the time is so short that they use it as a kind of solutioneering tool and and that I my personal feeling, is that you sometimes miss something because you haven’t had time to to talk to the right stakeholders, to get the right Intel, and you may be overly swayed by a particular political voice. And so the solution is there. You know, the delivery is there, but the quality of the final thinking sometimes doesn’t quite stack up, and you will find out when it’s executed a few years later.

Jacqueline Conway  07:30

Yeah, I’ve got two things to say about that. Wilson first picking up directly from your point about thinking. And I guess one of the things I see in some of the executive teams that I work with is that the capacity for thinking in terms of, well, the capability for thinking is there. You know, these are very bright, smart people, and you put them together, and the breadth and the depth of experience and knowledge is huge, but, but the capacity or the space that they allow themselves to have in order to do that thinking is the thing that, more often than not, is lacking, and that can be for a number of reasons, I guess. And one of them is, is that sort of classic, we don’t have time because people are moving at pace. And I’m wondering, if you’ve come across that too, and what, how you try and overcome that with clients. What’s the way around that conundrum? Okay,

Wilson Wong  08:38

unsurprisingly. I mean, Jacqueline, we face the same kind of of limitations. Organizations are busy. They have a lot of business as usual, pressing on their kind of entry every day. And that doesn’t lend itself to thinking, really, because you have to respond and react all the time. And as you know, most of us in our corporate careers, we’ve built out a body of experience. We deploy a range of heuristics. We know some things work better than others, and we just go into this kind of auto mode where we just go, it’s got to be done. It’s got to be done by the end of this week, at the end of the day, and drawing on a lifetime of research and experience, you kind of know what you can get away with right to just to get keep the show on the road. The trick is when you are faced with something that isn’t predictable, normal or the patterning is different, and you try to apply past experience and past learning to something that just isn’t quite the same, and that’s when you really should step back and look at the for. At the options. So what I find works well with some organizations is when they consciously, as they develop the current S curve of their current business, they have a small but highly critical team looking at how that S curve can be cannibalized, can be undermined, can be threatened, and to build the next S curve for the organization. And they shouldn’t be part of the business as usual, because then there’s a conflict, a tension between the current and the future. But you do that because what you want to do is to one exploit all the intellectual property and human capability to innovate and the innovation oftentimes, if it’s well done, will at some point begin to cannibalize the current business model. So when you are most successful, that is the time when you need to go. So how does cow can this break? Where does it go? And you think of companies like the classic example of Kodak and Fuji film, you know, and how Kodak had a wonderful business model. It was developing film for Hollywood. It had a whole slew of kind of chemical plants for their film business. And then you had Fuji, who also had a similar business model, but had begun to see the potential of some really crude digital senses for light and how they could be eventually developed into digital photography. So one company deepened their investment in the current S curve, and they were supreme. The other company took a punt and saw that maybe this could under cut the or at least take away a significant portion of that market. And so that’s become a kind of classic Business School case study of how one company built a second S curve whilst the other company locked down on the current one. Yeah, and, and, I think that’s, that’s, but I suppose that’s my kind of cautionary tale, that, yes, it is resource intensive. It doesn’t have to be resource heavy. You just need really bright, critical, small, bright, critical team that kicks the tires and gives the organization strategic options and then for the leadership to sponsor that kind of thinking. So

Jacqueline Conway  12:56

it sounds like what you were saying there was that you were advocating for a separate team, other than the the leaders in the business doing the futures and foresight work, because they haven’t got the kind of short term focus, the sense of busyness that the sheer volume of work that They have to do. So there’s an upside to that, but I guess I’m keen to hear your view on the potential downside, which is an actual fact in a earlier podcast episode with an Andrew curry. You know, I was, you know, I was sort of saying, but one of the challenges with foresight work is that it’s deeply experiential, isn’t it? And so the challenge with it being done elsewhere in the organization, from the the people who would make the final decision, is, is the is the challenge of communicating what are kind of deep, visceral learnings that the people who’ve gone through the foresight work process have and communicating that to other stakeholders. So that’s hard enough to communicate to that to other stakeholders when you are the leadership team. But how do you then get onto the leadership team’s agenda when they are so busy and they haven’t been through the process, and the process is inherently experiential. I mean, have you experienced that? And how do you You’re

Wilson Wong  14:27

absolutely right. Yes. You don’t want this team to work in their own silo. I’ll start with the advantages, the advantages for having a team like this when they’re focused on, you know, the next S curve is that they will be constantly refining and looking for data, the quality of data required to support their case, and experimenting on various scenarios that allow them to see various trajectories. Trees that the company could take the options, the important thing for them is that they need to be sponsored by the decision makers directly, so that the experience that they are going through in exploring through the data and the scenarios is part of the experience of the sponsor. If you look at the the example, and this is, again, a classic example of how successful foresight work is done. And this is a shell case that they had a scenario where they had anticipated a huge rise in oil prices. And this is, I think, in the 70s, and it doesn’t matter what the cause of the spike was, and if, of course, that was because of OPEC at the time, but they had already anticipated what kinds of things needed to change in the business to accommodate a price spike, and it was only successful in that case because one of the operations directors was involved, either being consulted, or one of the stakeholders or one of the experts In the scenario building. So when this scenario was activated, there was somebody already who knew how to activate it. Yes, you know you already knew, because you had worked through the scenario as one of the stakeholders. You saw both the risk and the opportunities. And of course, being someone who’s familiar with operators? You knew where the levers were. You didn’t have to persuade somebody else to activate those levers. They were yours.

Jacqueline Conway  16:47

I think I agree with you, because one of the beauties of of futures and foresights is it allows you to rehearse potential futures so that you’re able to be agile and responsive in a way that, because you see things coming and you think, Oh, if this issue coalesces with this other issue, we’ve already got a scenario for that. We know how this thing might play out. And because you intuit that you’re you’re able to move much more rapidly and much more quickly. So I think that, I mean, I really get that, that’s, that’s a real strength. I think one of the challenges, and it’s maybe less of a challenge now with COVID, although it might be more of a challenge, which is, there is so much potential to happen in the world. How could we, how could we possibly really be able to anticipate what might happen? How could we have been able to anticipate that Russia would invade Ukraine? How could we have anticipated many sort of global things that happened? Okay, there are some things that you can extrapolate relatively straightforwardly. You can, I guess, with some imagination, you can look at the impact that AI might have on your business. But how does that coalesce with things that are unknown and unknowable? And I think that when I speak to people about futures, that’s the thing that is often the thing that makes them say no to doing the work is that there’s almost a sense of that stuff that we can’t possibly know. So why would we bother? Okay,

Wilson Wong  18:33

I think you have to start with what matches to the business. What is what would or could keep them up at night. You know, it could be a terrorist attack on refinery plant in a particularly sensitive part of the supply chain, or it could be that climate change makes a plant that they’ve sunk billions on in not operational because of regulation or because the sea levels are too high for the coolant system to work, stuff like that. So very practical implications to their business and potentially the business model. So it really doesn’t matter what the cause is. That isn’t so important. What you want is to rehearse for the effect. And this reminds me of a scenario that was shared by the US Marines, and they are allowed to share scenarios. There are many, many, many, I think, 12 years after they’ve run it. But the scenario that they shared was a massive flow of refugees out of Syria. And this was done 20 years ago. I think 2030, years ago. The scenario, the. Trigger for that scenario, the trigger for that situation, in that scenario was kind of a drought, a severe, multi year drought that forced people to look for food and water. It wasn’t as we know, it wasn’t war. It wasn’t internal civil war, but the effect is the same, because if you’re looking at it from a security perspective, from of NATO countries, your borders are now being not attacked, but your borders are being stressed by millions of people crossing to survive, and you can’t block them, you know, you you have a humanitarian obligation. How does an organization like NATO, which is tasked with the protection of borders, respond to one humanitarian crisis, not of the people’s making. They’re not an evading force, but actually to some organization that is looking after the sovereignty of your of your borders, that is an issue. How do you respond as a block? How do you respond with all the stakeholders agreeing that this is the best way to respond to it, so they rehearse it within the NATO environment to go. When will the military be deployed? How will they be deployed? What kind of political risks will they be facing? What kind of options will politicians take that are rational and irrational, because the military will then have to carry out those political imperatives. So when organizations begin to look at foresight, not as an expensive indulgence, but as a tool that really makes them think about risk in some oftentimes visceral way. One, they have to know what is important to that business. And oftentimes, when you’re doing the question, yeah, yes, very much so and actually knowing what your business model is about, where the value points are and what threatens those value points is, I think, the kind of core 101, to executive leadership, and once you understand those risks and opportunities to your value proposition, and the weaknesses and and fragility of some of those value propositions, you begin to think, Okay, if this, what if this breaks down? What is my offer? What is my business continuity offer? Or what opportunities to this open up, because if it breaks for me or break for other people, so what would the people need at that point?

Jacqueline Conway  23:05

Right at the top of this conversation, you talked about your focus being on human capital, and tell me a bit more about that.

23:19

What, what

Jacqueline Conway  23:21

what that looks like in reality, in terms of what people are commissioning around human capital? What are the sorts of questions or curiosities that people have around human capital as it relates to the future? Okay,

Wilson Wong  23:36

well, let’s just start with human capital, just as a concept so they relate to people, and people work on a variety of things, using technology to amplify their capability. But one of the areas that is of great fun and interest to me is the notion of knowledge, and how that knowledge that people carry in their heads is activated. So organizations spend a lot of money engaging their workforce so that, you know, they get innovation, they get new ideas, they get people to alert them to things that are failing or not quite working or dangerous. And to a real extent, when you have a workforce that is very clear on the risk and opportunities and the values chain, they are your external intelligence senses, they may come across ideas or connect with certain developments in technology that then has an impact on your business, so your ability to harness and deploy that knowledge. Is potentially critical in an era of uncertainty, and people have their own different strengths. So someone who’s working for you as an IT technologist, his his particular interest could be, you know, horticulture, and what affects horticulture climate. And climate has all kinds of effects that you can monitor. And you might say, actually, we need to begin to prepare for this kind of risk.

Jacqueline Conway  25:31

One of the other things I’m interested in is who, who in the organization commissions work that’s specifically about human capital or about people.

Wilson Wong  25:41

Sometimes I see that some of the work is done by innovation teams, so they’re looking to to bring people together so that they get all kinds of Intel in one place. So they’re bringing together customer feedback, they’re bringing in new patents that are filed. They’re looking at new emerging business models and getting intel from their suppliers that we are getting business from this kind of young startup companies. And they do it really differently, you know. So those are the kinds of places where, you know, companies are building the second S curve, as I said earlier, and this is the beginnings of something that could disrupt your current way of working. So, so that’s one utility. That’s one place that human capital is nurtured. Because some companies formerly have innovation systems. The other part that companies do look at is their knowledge management system. And is, and contrary to the mythology, knowledge management systems is not it. It is about the climate of the organization, for people to share ideas, the feeling of safety and acknowledgement where they do share ideas, and their willingness to build social capital and build relationships with each other. So

Jacqueline Conway  27:15

let me ask Ben, the piece around who is who is commissioning this kind of work because, I guess I mean, you’ve given some examples about NATO and Syria, and a listener who’s working in a organization might be saying to themselves, that seems huge, and the impact of It is massive, in comparison to my relatively small organization, relative to NATO, and therefore, is there really, is there really a place for utilizing the same tools that you know, that the US military might might use in in my much smaller organization who is commissioning this kind of work?

Wilson Wong  28:04

It’s true that the best work is done by people who have long investment timelines. So you’re talking about energy companies who sink billions into a hydrocracker plant, or the military, where they have to bet on the maturity journey of certain technologies which can last decades. So they do use this with intent, and they understand the payback for this kind of long term scanning and scenario building. But it’s not. It’s not entirely kind of big corporate game either, because if you think about just individuals trying to navigate some of these uncertainties, you don’t have the level of data access than that Chell would have, for example, but it allows you to be thoughtful about your own career trajectory and how you fit in with the labor market. One

Jacqueline Conway  29:17

of the questions I often ask futurists is, have you got an example of a time where you did some futures and foresight work, and actually it really had practical benefit? You know that the scenario, either one of the scenarios, came to fruition, or that the that the insight that was generated was very practically and specifically helpful, as as as issues sort of started to started to come to fruition.

Wilson Wong  29:57

There was one not so long ago, what. Where the work was to look at the future of talent at a national level and so very high level. And you would expect that it would be, you know, that the impact will be uncertain. But one of the reasons that took off was because in coordinating all the government departments and the quangos and the agencies they wanted, they realized this was an issue. So it’s an issue of education. Is an issue of skills. It’s an issue of different industrial sector bodies. It’s an issue of efficiency, of labor deployment and long term learning, you know, so So there were a lot of dimensions to it, taken by so many agencies, and they needed a common vocabulary in order to come to work together for a specific issue that concerned all of them. And if you can understand all of us come from different disciplines, and we use our own vocabulary, and it’s not exactly helpful when you have an economist talking to a psychologist talking to musician to begin to solve something you know that was of common interest. So the report used a variety of stakeholder and expert groups to one socialize them into the vocabulary of futures and the what if methodologies, the ways of doing listening, active listening, so that you build some understanding of what’s on the other foot. So a lot of the methodologies used in in certainly in stakeholder voices and understanding some of the kind of quieter signals, is to understand that you don’t just go for the crude vote. You don’t just say, okay, eight people agreed that this was more likely than that to happen, and therefore we should pay attention to it. Sometimes it is the one person in the room who comes from a small discipline who has a view about some signal that the others have missed. So it could be an anthropologist, it could be a musician that has observed something about the way that people have changed in the way they appreciated music that gives you a clue as to some thing that’s happening in the social space, which you know, over time, can then impact their engagement with democratic institutions, with their willingness to participate in collective voice and perhaps even buy into some more fringe Voices. So this particular project provided a common vocabulary, understood and socialized by these different actors, students, private sector government, quangos, third sector, sometimes representatives, sometimes some of their members, and in so doing, they were able to voice what each thought could be helpful in the short, medium and long term, but all the time because of the socialization understanding that there was a longer term goal and that the short and medium term deliverables should try As much as possible not to cannibalize those long term options. So what happened after that was that there was a policy response. They use it as a consultation document. It wasn’t threatening because it was framed as a piece of thinking document. So you don’t have a situation where the consultant is kind of telling you what to do, is telling it’s actually framing what you can think about, what you should think about, in a way that makes sense to you. So the policy changes resulted in a revised kind of skills proposition, new incentives and renewed a conversation between, you know, like trade unions, professional bodies and the government as well as the educational establishments, so that they saw that they. Had plugged into some vision that this document surfaced.

Jacqueline Conway  35:11

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