“On Creating New Horizons:
Integrating Non-Linear Considerations To Better Manage
the Present From the Future”
John L. Anderson
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
300 E Street SW
Washington, DC 20546
Voice: (202) 358-4665
Michael Radnor
Professor of Management
J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management
Northwestern University
2001 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Voice: (847) 491-5617
John W. Peterson
Manager, Technology Strategy
Switching and Access Solutions R&D
Lucent Technologies Inc.
2000 North Naperville Road
Naperville, IL 60566
Voice: (630) 713-4848
November 1998
When preparing to shape the future, planners and policy makers must first integrate economic, political, cultural, and technology considerations with geo-strategic realities, national interests, developing alliances and existing capabilities. This synthesis must lead to a vision for the enterprise, be it a country, a business, or a project. The synthesis must also act as a catalyst, combining current realities, constructive confrontation, creativity, and intuition with the uncertainties about the future. These in turn, enable longer term decisions about investments, resource allocations and capability nurturing.
Such considerations will depend on the context and circumstances of the end game. To this end, it is important that the planners and policy-makers create new planning horizons, debate alternatives and integrate non-linear thinking into their thought processes, rather than argue about the form, the probabilities and the sources of the data points. In a departure from the tenets of formal scenario planning, a methodology is proposed that has the virtues of an informal, flexible, and adaptable approach. It allows for consideration of the difficult-to-quantify "softer factors" often overlooked or ignored in the more formal deterministic modeling.
“On Creating New Horizons:
Integrating Non-Linear Considerations To Better Manage
the Present From the Future”
INTRODUCTION
When economic, social, political or technological environments change in significant and unanticipated ways, long-standing functional practices must be challenged. Unfortunately such changes are frequently difficult to assess or even recognize while they are occurring. Under such circumstances, achievement of enterprise vision (if not enterprise survival) may require significant shifts in functional capabilities, processes and focus. [Radnor, Strauss and Peterson 1998]. What’s more, the articulation of an entirely new vision may be required by the changes. Scenario planning proponents attempt to anticipate such changes using scenario techniques to link emerging trends to fundamental competitive vulnerabilities. Burgelman and Grove describe discontinuities that affect where strategy takes shape and how it is implemented. Frequently this is a response to different levels of awareness within the organization of emerging market changes. Such discontinuities tend to come to a head at "strategic inflection points" where a strategic thrust or a core technology is vulnerable to attack. They describe these points as creating a "valley of death" for supporters of the existing approach because growth trajectories, plans and competitive behavior patterns must be fundamentally challenged and frequently changed. [Burgelman and Grove 1996]
Among the major factors which frequently hinder successful use of scenarios in planning are an enterprise’s poor strategic focus; insufficient commitment to the detail requirements of the techniques, a lack of involvement and participation by senior management (resulting in poor communication and poor acceptance of the outputs by lower level management), and the cost of retaining some of the critical skills involved in generating the analysis and outputs. Although scenario planning is intended to expose planning gaps and their impacts, pre-conceptions are often already embedded in the initial strategy assumptions, particularly in the specification of underlying issues. Such assumptions can often be traced to how companies and individual units perceive their core businesses, their environment, and their technology development, adaptation and acquisition decisions [Radnor, 1991]
Some believe scenario planning should be done by line managers rather than being relegated, as it often is, to the corporate planning activity. [Simpson, 1992] The authors echo this belief. Scenario planning is management tool, capable of being used throughout the business, not only as a centralized business function. Unfortunately, operational management is typically bound by rational yet frequently flawed assumptions of the business planning processes. Properly implemented, scenario planning loosens those bounds (which Dr. John Thompson of the Chief Technical Officer’s Office of Lucent Technologies Business Communications group describes as “artifacts of problems already resolved.”) Line managers must be provided with the tools and sufficient degrees of freedom to begin to adapt to emerging change when signals of those changes are initially discerned. Such signals must be flagged and injected into the planning processes at all levels. The scenario tool is a very powerful one. Unfortunately, it’s not well understood and rarely thought of as a means for line managers to drive to innovative solutions enabled by new planning ‘horizons.’ Scenario planning, when used at all, is typically done at a corporate level by a specialized group of planners and the linkages to groups managing on-going operations are extremely rare. Also unfortunately, the baggage associated with historical failed attempts to implement formal scenario planning results in resistant mind-sets going into the process. In order to harness the potential power of the tool for corporate advantage, the authors have attempted to adapt the techniques for use by any manager or management team needing or willing to consider creating an alternative future.
Normally both the generation and acceptance of new ideas is constrained by implicit mental models that guide adult thinking and beliefs (paradigms). Thinking is usually constrained to simple modifications to those paradigms, by linear extrapolations, and by incremental logic based on individually biased perceptions of the past. As individuals, our survival, success, and sense of worth are dependent upon our instinctive thought processes. However, these instincts inhibit us if changes around us or within us require that we redirect our thinking and behavior to achieve success in another area. Furthermore, within institutions, these instinctive human tendencies become incrementalism, bureaucracy and vested interests which inhibit innovations. Thus our powerful cognitive abilities can become obstacles when dealing with rapidly changing conditions and adapting to unanticipated changes. The creation and development of NASA’s Horizon Mission Methodology (HMM) has provided a means of overcoming this cognitive impedance. The methodology provides a guideline for nonlinear thinking in new arenas - different from the linear neighborhood of simple incremental thinking, extensions to current paradigms and extrapolations. The HMM does more than free up the mind to generate fresh ideas; it also helps in the actual infusion and acceptance of new ideas and strategies. Integration of the five step NASA methodology and the NCMS MATI[1] project tools and techniques for managing technology as in integrated part of strategy will allow the practitioner to address rapidly changing conditions, prepare for and adapt to unanticipated technological discontinuities, and allow rational challenging of underlying strategy assumptions.
THE HORIZON MISSION METHODOLOGY
In looking toward the future, humans usually extrapolate from present knowledge. Metaphorically, a flashlight beam is directed from the plane of the present onto a dark wall which is the plane of the future. Unfortunately, the only future illuminated is the portion of the wall in direct alignment with the beam.
Figure 1 - Depiction of traditional mission focus
This flashlight beam metaphor characterizes most human thinking, analysis, planning, and creativity. The 'flashlight beams' of our minds are the bounds of paradigms, extrapolations and logic. Intellectually, we understand that much of the future lies in the dark areas beyond the bounds of the beams. After all, the future always brings surprises. Such surprises often precipitate breakthroughs, innovations, crises, paradigm shifts and the visions in the minds of major players.
The Horizon Mission Methodology (HMM) provides a systematic way for users to step outside the bounds of the 'flashlight beam' to "see", think, and plan. The HMM was developed at NASA by John Anderson, one of the authors. [Anderson, 1993, 1993, 1995, 1996] It has been used in dozens of diverse workshops for government agencies such as NASA and for other institutions such as universities, business and socio-cultural institutions. The HMM is a carefully structured 5-step process for creating and thinking within an entirely new frame of reference based on a postulated future. This future, reached in a mental leap outside the beam, is called a ‘Horizon Mission’ by NASA. This 'Mission' may in fact be a space mission but it may also be an enterprise vision, a policy, a technology capability, an axiom, an organizational identity, a market or customer need, a product or solution, an external constraint, a strategy, a strategic thrust, or even a metaphor. For business purposes, the authors have elected to call the ‘mental leap’ a ‘New Horizon,’ acknowledging it’s origins but avoiding the business implications and baggage of the term ‘mission.’ The implicit New Horizon starting point, ten to fifty years into the future, pre-empts linear, extrapolative thinking and forces non-linear intuitive thinking well beyond the bounds of current plans and expectations. The five steps of the HMM (as adapted to business practice) are:
Step 1. Make an intuitive leap outside the bounds of the 'flashlight beam" to create extraordinary, impossible, ‘mind-blowing' alternative futures - the New Horizons - those beyond current reach. The New Horizon should be strategically relevant and plausible but it must also leapfrog foreseeable solutions.
Step 2. Construct a new frame of reference by defining the New Horizon in terms of: motivating forces, novel, unique and/or critical functions, pivotal or unprecedented capabilities and extreme performance levels. In other words, invent the 'world' or create the vision to be brought about by this New Horizon. This world should include assumptions about economic, technological, cultural and political attributes and drivers.
Step 3. Think within this new frame of reference to identify breakthrough innovations (in both activities and technologies) required to achieve that future. The key is that functional capability and engineering alternatives should be expressed at a higher level than simple incremental activity or technology alternatives. This step is more difficult than it seems. It requires considerable discipline to stay on track - to think first at a higher functional level than simply drive to a '‘right technology answer'.
Step 4. Begin the return 'back from the future' to the present. The higher level functions can then be clustered into vision-inspiring categories. Evocative metaphors are extremely productive and integrative at this stage of the process. High leverage categories such as entirely new capabilities, new common (or multi-use) technologies, infrastructure changes, new uses, applications, and dramatic potential payoffs can then be identified and explored.
Step 5. The high leverage concepts are then transformed back into the present by identifying and working through the business value and technology value chains and relating functional activities[2] and selected technologies to functional activities. Near-term steps and issues such as: new products, new markets, new capabilities, investment and required breakthroughs (e.g., Technologies), other drivers and motivating forces and insights concerning competitive activity in these areas can then be identified and programmed for pursuit and response after being identified during environmental scanning.
Figure 2 - Graphic Depiction of ‘New Horizons’
OBSTACLES TO CHANGE AND INNOVATION
Humans appear to search for, intake and organize information all in accordance with 'inner models of reality' called paradigms. In a seminal work a paradigm has been described as "an entire constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by members of a given technical community... it is also one element of that constellation - a concrete solution to a performance problem which used as a model or example can replace explicit rules as a basis for solutions of future problems" [Kuhn, 1970]. As 'inner models' paradigms perform at least two major cognitive functions: they set forth the 'game being played' with themes, rules, and boundaries. They act as literal physiological filters. [Barker, 1992] Paradigms are deeply ingrained, often largely unconscious. They exert powerful, unseen limits on our analytical, creative and judgmental abilities. These paradigms act as frames of reference that seem to filter information, organize knowledge and evaluate new ideas for us - largely without our realizing it.
Change is difficult for both individual humans and for institutions. Perhaps surprisingly, technology itself makes change difficult because it structures the way we look at things and how we organize knowledge. Technology-of-the-past has produced structured expectations. Technology-of-the-future will change those expectations and add others. "(T)echnological inventions [such as] machines, produce in the minds of those familiar with their structure and function, a mental model, image, or analog of the cause-and-effect processes embodied in the machine. These models become useful for describing and explaining other phenomena and events." [Cott, 1984].
Such models also become restrictive. In the experience of the scenario planners at Royal Dutch/Shell, "... the real purpose of effective planning is not to make plans but to change the... mental models that these decision makers carry in their heads." [De Geus, 1988] Moreover, "...it is important to note that models which we hold in our minds implicitly can have more power than models we recognize explicitly as models; when we do not recognize our ideas are models of reality, we tend to think of them as "the truth", and do not re-examine and improve our models over time." [Kline, 1990] "Sometimes strategies must be left as broad visions, not precisely articulated, to adapt to a changing environment...Real strategic changes requires inventing new categories, not rearranging old ones." [Mintzberg, 1994]
NON-LINEAR APPROACHES TO THINKING
When a different approach to a problem or issue is sought, we must somehow alter or replace the personal and/or institutional models that determine our current viewpoint. However, major alteration or replacement of models is quite difficult. A significant part of these models is implicit and thus initially hidden from conscious awareness and hence scrutiny. This implicit part thus functions as an unsuspected model, unconsciously guiding - or misguiding - our "objective" analysis and evaluation of any change. That is why logical linear analysis can be so ineffective for problems of significant innovation. Furthermore, one might suspect that a linear, logical approach to solving the linear, logical problem is hopeless. For this reason, non-linear thinking and approaches are needed. Following are some examples.
An example of Non Linear Thinking: The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI - An illustration of integrating technology and science fiction to create a new national defense policy.). Americans have a long-standing love affair with high technology, and nowhere is it more evident than in the Department of Defense. Be it real or imagined, some in the West believe that American President Ronald Reagan’s March 23, 1983 call to the American scientific and technical community to undertake a ‘comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long term research and development program designed to ‘achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles’ was one among a handful of major causes for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. America’s apparent commitment to pursue new strategic defensive technologies that the Soviet Union could not match in terms of either defensive or offensive capability, helped create intolerable stresses upon their economic and political infrastructures.
History will sort out the details of what was real and what was imagined. What is of immediate interest is that the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative broke out of the bounds of the incremental innovation of earlier American anti-ballistic missile efforts. [Pap 1998] Reportedly, the White House sponsored a series of meetings where military planners, scientists and selected writers of science fiction actually met and discussed systems of space defenses in future and alternative worlds as depicted in published works of fiction. Efforts were then made to link back from those future system capabilities to emerging or conceptual technologies. Scientific gaps were identified and explored. Programs were then proposed based on assumed linkages between the current state of innovation, achievable conceptual science, and the described capabilities of the future systems. [March of the Machines, 1998] Based on the nature of the technology outputs, it would appear that an options approach was taken to increase the probability of multiple breakthroughs and enrich the contributions to science.
By leveraging the works of those already operating beyond the bounds of incremental thinking and beyond the bounds of emerging and possible technologies, the SDI effort was able to plant the seeds of non-linear thinking in the minds of the incrementalist decision makes, both within the scientific and military planning communities. More pragmatically, the scale of the program was such that it provided seed technologies in areas originally unimagined by the participants from the military planning community. Even today there is informed debate about whether SDI technologies could have been developed and made to work to the precision needed. But regardless of the answer the non-linear thinking of SDI resulted in the breakthrough thinking required for New Horizons. It showed the power of a compelling vision (however non-linear) backed by commitment to alter the ‘world’ in unexpectedly positive ways.
A New Horizon Example: A New Transportation Infrastructure -An illustration of infrastructure leapfrogging technology. The Civil TiltRotor is an aeronautical craft whose turboprop engines can perform in the vertical orientation for takeoff and landing and can be rotated into a horizontal orientation to provide forward flight. The illustration emerged in a workshop held to provide a new basis for a Civil TiltRotor program that focused on aviation system capacity instead of disciplined incremental technology improvement.