PDF Summary:Lead from the Future, by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

In Lead from the Future, business strategists Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz argue that to drastically improve your organization's chances of successful growth in the long term, you must anticipate and shape the future rather than simply react to challenges as they arise.

Drawing on insights from their research and experience working with prominent companies, Johnson and Suskewicz provide a practical, three-stage framework that enables you to stay ahead of your competition and unlock new possibilities for your organization. In this guide, we’ll explore their thoughts on how you can adopt a future-oriented mindset, anticipate and shape future trends, and create innovative solutions that drive growth and success in a rapidly changing world. We also share ideas from other business experts, innovative thinkers, and sociology writers so you can better understand and adopt the visionary planning process.

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Instead of trying to predict the future, Taleb proposes combining a highly conservative approach to risk management with a willingness to take small risks, which can protect against unexpected events while allowing for opportunities for growth and innovation.

Step 2: Think About How Your Business Will Fare in the Future

In the second step of creating your vision, identify what your company’s future looks like given the assumptions you’ve developed about the future landscape and your current strategies. Discuss with your team whether the company would still have long-term relevance and sustained growth relevance if you continued doing what you’re doing now.

The authors advise that you examine potential threats and opportunities and determine which is likely to play a larger role in your future so that you can develop a strategy to either respond to threats or take advantage of opportunities.

(Shortform note: Many business experts recommend a tool called a SWOT analysis to help you examine potential threats, opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses in your organization and assess how they might affect your visionary strategy. A SWOT analysis identifies internal strengths and weaknesses (factors your company can control or improve upon) and external opportunities and threats (factors that a company must monitor and respond to). By analyzing these factors, companies can gain insights into their competitive position and make informed decisions about future strategies.)

Step 3: Finalize Your Future Vision

Now that you’ve thought about the future landscape at your target time horizon and identified implications for your business, you can construct a future vision. A future vision describes what services or products you’ll offer, how you’ll create value in the market, and how you’ll address necessary factors in future growth—for example, gaps in your company’s current capabilities that need to be modified to support change and growth.

Start with a bird’s eye view of your company’s future by asking yourself: Who will our customers be? What products and services will we offer them? What areas of the world will we serve? What frameworks will we use to organize our company’s activities?

(Shortform note: In Traction, Gino Wickman adds that you should create a marketing strategy as a part of your vision. According to Wickman, a successful marketing plan includes identifying your ideal customers based on factors such as their location, age, and income, creating a list of potential customers that meet that description, and highlighting what sets your business apart from the competition.)

To solidify your vision, the authors recommend you develop a compelling story that describes it. This story should include your company’s larger purpose, a summary of the assumptions you’ve developed about the future, the implications for the business, and how your company will change in response to those implications. A future vision story rooted in your company’s greater purpose will motivate employees and stakeholders and help attract new talent.

An example of a visionary story for a solar panel company could be, “If we don’t take immediate and significant action to address climate change, our future could look very different from our present. Our vision is to create a world where renewable energy is accessible to all. We believe that by developing innovative and sustainable solutions, we can make a significant impact on the planet and improve the lives of people everywhere. Together, we can build a brighter future for generations to come.”

(Shortform note: Wickman provides many ideas for how to share your visionary narrative with your company—for example, you could present your vision at a kickoff meeting or establish priorities for individual departments to support your vision. Wickman says that communicating your vision provides a clear direction to employees to make better vision-informed decisions.)

Stage 2: Convert Your Vision to Strategy

Now that you have a future vision, you must convert it into a strategy that will bring your vision to life. According to the authors, your strategy contains three connected components (which they call portfolios): your long-term financial picture of your business, innovation roadmap, and resource plan. These components are interdependent and respond to change—you must look at all three together to get a holistic view of your visionary plan and update each component as new insights emerge.

Step 1: Develop a Long-term Financial Picture of Your Business

Developing a long-term financial picture helps you estimate the revenue and profits your future vision will likely yield. To develop this component of your visionary strategy, you must first identify a growth target that aligns with your future vision, then calculate what the authors call your growth gap and figure out when your growth gap is likely to develop.

Your growth target is an aspirational revenue and profit benchmark for your company at your target time horizon (for example, your growth target could be to increase your revenue by a certain percentage over the next decade). When identifying a growth target, consider the different areas in which you could pursue growth. You can improve or change your core product or offer supplements to the core product. You might also develop all new products.

(Shortform note: In Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman argues that online businesses do not benefit from engaging in time-consuming computations about aspirational revenue goals and potential areas of growth. This is because such an approach could potentially place you in a disadvantageous position due to rapidly changing market dynamics, rendering your product outdated. Reid explains that growing quickly as an internet-based business requires that you move quickly and that taking a cautious, calculating approach can quickly make you lose ground amongst your competitors or make your company obsolete.)

After selecting an ambitious but practical growth target, discuss and decide how much growth your core and proximate businesses can realistically deliver by your target time horizon. With this information, you can calculate your growth gap—the difference between what you aspire to deliver and what you are likely to deliver, given your current status. Knowing your growth gap helps you determine how fast and large any new innovative business ventures must be to reach your growth target.

(Shortform note: As a leader, considering your personal growth gap might also be valuable. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown discusses a growth gap that occurs in people’s lives—a space between where you are in your life now and where you want to be. Brown explains that acknowledging this gap is crucial for personal growth and development. Rather than avoiding or dismissing the discomfort that arises from this disparity, she encourages people to explore their aspirations and the steps required to bridge the gap. By mindfully acknowledging your personal growth gap and actively working towards closing it, you can cultivate resilience and the courage to pursue your authentic desires.)

Step 2: Develop an Innovation Roadmap

Your innovation roadmap outlines the steps you need to take to achieve your growth target. This component of your visionary strategy includes your company’s core, proximate, and new growth projects and any undertakings that will develop the company's capabilities to support growth.

The first task in creating an innovation plan is to develop a timeline. To do this, work backward from your future vision by setting progress markers at around two- to three-year intervals from then until now. For example, with a 10-year target time horizon, figure out what the company should look like and be doing in eight years, then six years, then four. At each progress marker, the authors advise you to check in about a few key aspects of the business: what core and new business initiatives need to be in progress and what new capabilities and structures need to be developed in the business to support these initiatives.

The authors stress that working backward from your future vision is crucial because otherwise, your current processes, regulations, and progress evaluation methods will blind you to innovative possibilities.

Creating a Measurable Roadmap for Your Vision

The authors tell you when to set progress markets but aren't very specific about what aspects of your progress to check and measure. In Traction, Wickman fills that gap: He, too, advises creating 10-year goals for your business, but he recommends different benchmarks leading up to that and dives into greater detail on what to measure at those benchmarks. Let’s look at Wickman’s approach and how you might use some of his recommendations in the implementation of your innovation roadmap.

Your three-year goal should include measurable targets such as revenue and profit, key metrics to achieve, and a vision of the company's future appearance regarding team members, resources, systems, technology, products, and customers. You might measure your progress toward these targets at the eight or six year markers, as you’ll have had ample time to increase revenue and profit and develop a vision of the company’s future appearance.

Your one-year plan should align with the three-year goal with its own revenue and profit goal, along with a one-year metric that can be used to track progress and up to seven important targets to achieve within the current year plan. You might measure your progress toward these targets at the four year marker.

Your three-month priorities should include your most important tasks for the next 90 days— for example, hiring key employees or filling critical positions. This will help your company progress and stay on track by aligning priorities among different departments and ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals. In the authors’ roadmap, it doesn’t really make sense to set such short-term priorities, as doing so would likely keep you mired in current-state thinking.

Step 3: Develop a Resource Plan

Your resource plan outlines where you'll invest your financial resources and human resources (such as innovation talent and leadership skills) and where those resources will come from. Developing this plan clarifies where you’ll need to cut funding, which projects to slow down, and which to continue in service of the visionary strategy.

(Shortform note: The resources that Johnson and Suskewicz mention are, in a broader sense, funded by an organization's customers. Companies naturally recognize this and often end up resisting changes in business strategy because they become what Clayton Christensen calls resource dependent—intent only on keeping their current customer base. This makes it harder to be innovative because existing customers just want more of the same. To overcome resource dependence, he advises, as do Johnson and Suskewicz, that you create an independent entity to lead the development and marketing of disruptive products. This allows for the creation of a separate culture and cost structure that fits the innovation project.)

To begin, take stock of the resources you currently have. Then, set an appropriate investment goal for each of your company’s growth areas. Lastly, calculate how far off your target investments are from what you’re currently investing. Each growth area will have distinct expectations for growth, risk, and return, and the authors explain that you must balance these factors to optimize your investment plan.

For example, the authors explain that you will likely have to draw resources away from some initiatives to increase them in others. You may need to completely stop some of your programs because they don’t fit into your future vision—a difficult decision with a current-state thinking mindset but an easier decision with a visionary planning one.

(Shortform note: Given how complex calculating target investments for each of your company’s target growth areas could be, it may be helpful to visualize the data with innovation project tools like the ones Vijay Kumar discusses in 101 Design Methods. You might, for example, create a grid that lists growth areas in one direction and investment resources in another, which would allow you to play with different scenarios of how you might allocate resources to maximize growth.)

Stage 3: Realize Your Visionary Plan

At this stage, you’ve formed a vision and developed a new growth strategy in service of your vision. To realize your visionary plan, you must structure your teams to embody your strategy and then execute it.

Step 1: Structure Your Organization to Carry Out Your Strategy

The authors advise that you structure your organization in a way that allows your teams to effectively execute your strategy. To do so, you must involve your senior leadership, position your breakthrough innovation teams for success, and establish a discovery cycle process to oversee new projects.

The senior leadership team’s responsibilities. Senior leadership must be involved in all major decisions about innovation projects. They should oversee projects by balancing efficiency and quality, and protect breakthrough innovation teams from conflicting interests of the business’s core (like funding).

(Shortform note: Business innovation experts agree that senior leadership should protect the interests of breakthrough innovation teams. One way of doing so is to establish a dedicated pool of resources to promote growth initiatives and take strong measures to safeguard it—for example, by creating separate teams or units to work on innovation projects. Additionally, while they agree that leadership should oversee innovation projects, they acknowledge that senior management cannot be intimately engaged in every detail of those projects. Therefore, they should position themselves to make sure new projects are going well and then work with the team to solve any issues that may come up.)

Position breakthrough innovation teams for success. When it comes to building and organizing innovation teams, it's important to start small and bring together employees from different departments or functions who can work together on a specific project. Look for people with an entrepreneurial mindset who are willing to take risks and have a passion for the project's vision.

To foster innovation, teams should be organized like startup incubators, competing for funding from the company as they develop their ideas. It's important to support them with the necessary resources and infrastructure but also to allow them to work independently and take risks. By creating an environment that supports innovation, companies can attract and retain top talent and drive long-term growth.

The Two Innovation Teams Your Company Needs

Johnson and Suskewicz’s recommendations imply that you should have multiple teams working on different aspects of innovation, but they don’t go into much detail about what these teams should look like and do. Some business experts agree that innovation should not be done by a single organizational unit and that your company should build two cross-functional innovation teams that include members with diverse skills and expertise: a distributed innovation group (DIG) and an enterprise integration group (EIG).

The DIG looks for new ideas and helps people develop them by offering tools and resources. The EIG helps ensure that different parts of the company work well together by managing how they do things and helping them find better ways to work together. Both teams should be staffed by knowledgeable, experienced IT professionals who can use technology to help people work together and develop new ideas.

Step 2: Execute Your Strategy

The execution stage of your visionary plan has three phases—gestation, expedition, and evolution.

In the gestation phase, you test the important assumptions you’ve made about the future landscape. Early on, it's crucial to create some momentum by validating some of these key assumptions and meeting some early-stage goals. Additionally, the authors recommend you prepare to scale up your initiatives by making changes to your core business that will generate the necessary cash flow. Gestation typically lasts two to three years.

In the expedition phase, your focus shifts away from testing your assumptions and toward standardizing processes, establishing rules, and defining metrics to measure your efficiency and profitability. Expedition typically lasts two to four years.

In the evolution phase, you must decide whether to integrate your new growth initiatives into the core business or keep them separate. If you integrate new growth initiatives, their profits should be similar to the margins of the core business and enhance the core brand. If you don’t integrate them, the new business outgrowths must have their own brand and different rules, metrics, and norms. Evolution typically lasts one to three years.

A Closer Look at the Three Phases of Execution

In his other book, Reinventing Your Business Model, Mark Johnson discusses in more detail the three phases that organizations pass through as they mature or shift strategy.

He explains that the gestation phase is a period of exploration and experimentation where new ideas are developed and tested. During this stage, you should focus on researching and developing new products and services. It’s a time when innovation is encouraged and failure is tolerated.

During the expedition phase, the process, rules, and metrics your company establishes are aimed at growth, expansion, and scaling up. He adds you should also focus on marketing and customer acquisition to drive revenue growth during this phase.

Johnson provides a broader view of the evolution phase, explaining that it’s a critical period when companies must adapt to changing market conditions or face decline. During this phase, your company may encounter increased competition, changing customer needs, and disruptive technologies. You must decide whether to stay with your approach to core and new business outgrowths or make major changes to your approach to meet evolving landscapes and new challenges.

Make the Visionary Planning Approach a Part of Your Organization

The authors emphasize that visionary planning is not just a process you go through once and then are done with. In order to ensure growth and relevance for your organization in the long run, you must make visionary planning a continued part of how the organization operates. To do so, you must elevate and encourage visionary mindsets and skills in your leaders (including yourself) and institutionalize visionary planning as part of your organization's processes.

(Shortform note: The authors of The Innovator’s DNA add that to embed a visionary and innovative mindset in your organization, you must also structure your teams in a way that helps team members develop and use the skills and mindset you wish to encourage. Team members’ skills should balance and complement each other—assess each member’s strengths and form your teams based on what each person brings to the table.)

The Visionary Mindset and Skills for Leaders

Leaders with a visionary mindset and skill set successfully implement the visionary planning process and pass their skills and perspectives along to the teams they oversee. The authors explain that visionary thinkers don’t possess a mysterious set of rare traits that make them uniquely capable of envisioning possibilities and mobilizing opportunities—they simply work to keep a broad perspective, and they maintain an optimistic attitude about the possibility of change. Additionally, to be a successful visionary leader, the authors recommend you do the following:

• Become familiar with the discovery cycle process and get comfortable investigating, envisioning, and experimenting with ideas.
• Develop the mental flexibility to switch between current-state thinking and visionary planning.
• Continually rethink and reshape your visions for the company’s future based on emerging data.

(Shortform note: In The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner also argue that leadership is a skill you can improve through conscious effort, and many of their recommendations for effective leadership mirror those of Johnson and Suskewicz. However, while Johnson and Suskewicz emphasize improving your mental agility through the techniques listed above, Kouzes and Posner focus on building relationships with your team members. One way to do this is to recognize and celebrate the contributions of team members, which can help to foster a positive and supportive work environment.)

Organizational Processes

To build a visionary planning mindset into the processes and structures of your organization, you must create a culture where no one is afraid of being judged for exploring and developing their talents, as this limits people’s ability to imagine the future and innovate. Foster an egalitarian company culture that values everyone’s ideas. Additionally, it's important to prioritize inclusiveness and demographic diversity because differing perspectives contribute to a broader understanding of your customers and open-mindedness to new ideas on every level of the organization.

(Shortform note: Creating an environment that embraces experimentation and diversity is a key aspect of establishing what experts call psychological safety within the workplace. Psychological safety is necessary for innovation: When employees feel apprehensive about potential repercussions for mistakes or non-conformity, it hampers their ability to have visionary and innovative mindsets, think critically, unleash their creativity, and solve problems. Other strategies to cultivate psychological safety include promoting collaboration, bolstering employees' confidence through positive feedback, and actively seeking their input on ways to enhance the organization’s culture and systems.)

The authors explain that it’s important to tirelessly communicate your vision and larger purpose with your employees to ensure everyone understands it and knows how they can contribute to it. Studies have shown that being connected to the larger mission improves productivity and employee retention. Additionally, it's essential to have clear, concrete goals that employees, customers, and investors can connect to and support. By having a clear vision and purpose and communicating it effectively, you can cultivate a visionary planning mindset throughout your organization.

(Shortform note: In What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben Horowitz argues that what leaders communicate to their team members through their words and behaviors creates a blueprint for the company’s culture which greatly affects employee behavior and performance. He explains that you should create your company’s culture with intention. When an organizational culture is deliberately designed, it aligns with the company's vision and larger purpose. This in turn makes it clear to employees how to contribute to the company's progress. The way to establish a healthy company culture, according to Horowitz, is to lay a foundation of values, model those values as a leader, be inclusive, and continuously strive to improve your culture.)