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At the heart of Imagine it Forward, at the heart of the practice I learned in business, is this notion of literally imagining forward a variety of scenarios. I’m a natural worrier. I worry all the time. I usually worry about the worst-case scenario and I’ve had to train myself to be more of an optimist. I think in business we assume that because something happened in the past, it’s going to exactly roll out that way in the future. We all know that’s not the way it works, but we convince ourselves.
I’ve found in new spaces, when you’re looking into the future, it’s really helpful to do scenario planning group exercises. It’s not just something you hire a consultant to do. When we were looking to go into clean technology, this was particularly helpful. One is to get a team to go out and paint the worst-case possible. Assign your Bad News Bears, the worst-case team. They imagine the idea never works and your company craters. Then you get the optimists team, the unicorns and rainbows team. Put some numbers behind it: what would it look like? Honestly, even the most optimistic teams aren’t as optimistic as your company business plan. They all go like this, they’re big hockey sticks of kind of fake optimism. But they’re out there looking for the Blue Sky scenarios.
And then you debate them, and usually what happens is you come up with a pretty moderate scenario that is not wildly out of bounds or as negatively conservative as you can be. You debate that around, and sometimes you go with a more conservative or a more positive outlook based on all the research that you’ve done. So yeah, there’s imagination and that planning ahead, but you can also marry research, insight, some of these sparks and provocateurs to help you map out these stories of either a very conservative or a very optimistic future, and then you decide how you want to calibrate from there.
The other thing is you have to find a mechanism so that you’re constantly testing. Has anything happened that basically says that scenario was crazy, or that validates— you know what, things are looking more negative, we ought to go back and look at some of those statistics. I think every business needs to have that kind of practice, and I think even teams do, too. So, you know, is the finance guy going to go for this or not? Is my boss going to approve this or not, and if he does, what do I do? If he doesn’t, what do I do? I think it’s a good way to operate as a team.