Surveying the Future
The problem with surveys
There’s a type of management article that starts out like this: “We surveyed 857 executives across a wide range of industries…19% reported an improvement when this technique was instituted.” The goal of these survey articles is to unravel subjective information gathered from people working in a political environment to understand something about the way organizations work.
People who design surveys spend a lot of time trying to eliminate subjectivity errors. They frame the same question in different ways. They ask the same question in different contexts. They ask the inverse of the question or an inverse of something similar. They go to a lot of trouble to remove bias from responses.
Despite these efforts, fundamental issues remain. For instance, there are differences between what people say happened and what really happened. Someone in charge of leading a change initiative probably views the results as more positive than those that were affected by it. Another problem, is that you can’t really analyze what hasn’t happened yet.
You can’t survey the future
One of the biggest problems with surveys is that they’re backwards looking. They focus on things that have already happened. They deal exclusively with the status quo. They describe the way things currently work or the way people currently think. They can’t tell you anything about the future.
To be sure, there is value in understanding if a certain technique or approach was effective, but this must be viewed in the context of today — of today’s culture, today’s economy, today’s technology, today’s organizations. Things that work well for one group of people may not work well for another. Things that work well for one group at a given time may not work well for the same group later on. It’s easy to overgeneralize the results of a survey and imply connections between things that do not really exist. This is especially a problem because analysis is typically done by people who don’t have enough real-world experience to truly appreciate the problems they are analyzing.
Actually, you can survey the future
In order to survey the future, you need a different kind of survey. View “survey” in its grander sense. Imagine standing on a hilltop looking over a sunny field — like George Washington surveying the new counties of Virginia. Now, instead of a literal landscape, imagine looking over your organizational landscape. Note the lay of the land. Survey its features. You have the real-world experience to do this and the specific knowledge and insight into your organization to do it well.
Now instead of looking over where things are today, look over how things could be. What should the organization look like in order to achieve its goals? What pieces do you need? What pieces are no longer relevant? How should groups fit together? What should their workflows look like? To survey the future, you have to invent it first — figure out where things should be, and use this to guide change.
Note that you do not have free rein to change everything. You must respect the organizational landscape. The changes you envision must be compatible with the lay of the land. This is what makes your organization special. This is the heart of your organization. Figuring out how to leverage the unique aspects of your organization’s landscape is the real challenge — and potential — here. This is why vision can be so important when an organization needs to change. More on this in an upcoming post.
Trackbacks