Foresight

Foresight has two distinct components. The first is to create a thorough understanding of what Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal (PESTEL) shifts are emerging and categorise these into opportunities and threats. The second part is to decide how to respond. What would you need to do strategically to maximise the opportunities and mitigate the threats? However, as the challenges are new the ideas to solve them have also often never been tried before. As such they are fraught with risk leaving us hesitant to make the step. MAX VMG has access to powerful tools that when applied can give us the benefit of hindsight and mitigate the risk, which is just invaluable in order to take action with confidence.

Insight

Insight is about really understanding how your organisation is set up and behaving to respond to the changing circumstances highlighted in Foresight. It requires a holistic and systemic approach to diagnosing what’s in place and helpful and what’s not, which is conducted with a vertical slice of informed personnel through workshops to uncover this. It’s then about identifying the priority areas to address and forming these into mini projects led by functional or cross functional work groups to bring about the changes required to respond effectively.

Eight out of ten change initiatives fail because we don’t take the people with us on the journey (John Kotter). So really understanding who has an influence on your change initiatives, but also how to influence them is key. For the first part we map out the stakeholders and their level of influence, to highlight who is key and the order in which to influence them. The second stage is to design an engagement process that not only informs them of the purpose for the change, but also the urgency, the destination when completed, the success path to get there built in collaboration with them, before ensuring everyone is committed to make the change.

Agility is the ability to change your position efficiently, and requires the integration of balance, coordination, speed, reflexes, strength, and endurance. However, whenever we are facing periods of change our emotions can get the better of us and leave us feeling impaired, confused and fearful. With this in mind we need to pay real attention to each individuals emotional response and also the collective mindset to any proposed changes by actively engaging with them to lead them through the change. We do this by hearing their worst fears, helping them right size these as often they can be over inflated, but also wake them up to the new possibilities that might come from the change. Finally it’s about helping them realise what they need to do more of or less of to move forward and bring the change about.