Subtitled "How To See The Invisible and Do The Impossible" (who wouldn't like to be able to do that?), Flash Foresight is about how to use strategic foresight and certainty to drive innovation and growth. It's a good read. Here's an excerpt of an excerpt that Dan himself used in a recent article in Fast Company talking about how the best business strategy to deal with a huge problem may be just to skip it altogether:
"Here is an exercise I often do with my clients. "Close your eyes for a moment and ask yourself: In my work, what is the biggest problem I'm facing right now? Keep your eyes closed until you've come up with an answer."
Their eyes invariably pop open again in just seconds; our biggest problems have a way of sitting right on our shoulders, ready to jump in and make their presence known at a moment's notice. Try this yourself; to get maximum benefit from the exercise, you may want to jot down your answer. Now, with that biggest problem firmly in mind, here's what we're going to do: we're going to take that problem . . . and skip it.
The typical approach is to grab that problem and attempt to solve it. The problem with trying to solve your problem is that in order to solve it, you engage it, and by engaging it you embrace it-- which often leads to getting your wheels mired in the mud of the problem, stuck in crisis mode and unable to move forward.
Flash foresight takes a different path. Rather than engaging with your biggest roadblocks by confronting them, often you'll find you can simply leap over them. This is not a philosophy of denial, avoidance, or procrastination. It is a powerful kind of conceptual jujitsu that teases previously invisible crises out into the open, where we can take decisive action to address them. The key to unraveling our most intractable problems often lies in recognizing that the problem confronting us is not our real problem; the real problem lies hidden behind the distraction of what we think our problem is. Skipping your biggest problem means stepping outside the flat plane of the existing situation and gaining a clearer perspective, and this often triggers flash foresights that lead to new opportunities far bigger and more productive than you could have imagined based on the original (incorrect) problem you were trying to solve."
Daniel will be visiting four other web sites as well. His itinerary for the week is:
Monday, March 7th: Jeff De Cagna: Principled Innovation @pinnovation
Tuesday, March 8th: Chris Wilson: The Fresh Peel @FreshPeel
Wednesday, March 9th: Brand Mix @martinjbishop
Thursday, March 10th: Phil Gerbyshak: Make It Great @philgerb
Friday, March 11th: Rajesh Setty: Bringing Ideas To Life @RajSetty
Earlier Post2Post book tour author Brand Mix visits:
Seth Godin: Meatball Sundae
Erika Andersen: Being Strategic
Thanks to Paul Williams (Idea Sandbox) for inviting me to participate and organizing the book tour.
1 comment:
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