Courageous Conversations for Future-Ready Leaders… Conversation #1
Leaders have an impossible task of inventing the future while dealing with the past, yet living in the present.
If you are too concerned with the past, about the legacy, about the way you will be remembered, you truly endanger a good healthy future. If you are concerned with putting out fires day-by-day-by-day, you will get mired in the present and never fully develop a vision for the future.
And when the unexpected and the unplanned for comes, you will be caught by surprise.
Historically, leaders attempt to design the future with Strategic Planning. These are strategies that are projected into a five or ten year cycle with calculated steps along the way. They are mostly utilizing current data to project a continuation of the present into the future. But in the 21st Century, I suggest that instead of strategic plans we need strategic preparation. Preparation is radically different from planning. Preparing for the future — being future-ready — involves several conversations that we must have, with ourselves, with our companions and perhaps with the future itself.
Leading is about relationships not the ability to interpret a spreadsheet or keep appointments. Or even predict the future.
