What one could call “feedback” or the “dashboard approach” is another tool that can help an analyst reinvent for the future. This tool should help the analyst identify the indicators that matter, adjust her current approach in order to better anticipate potential future realities. Identify the indicators that matter means understanding the factors and the deep structural trends that are shaping the landscape in a profound and durable way. This should help you adjust your current approach and activities accordingly in order to better anticipate the future bumps and turns of the road ahead. Here too, you might be tempted to think that it is paradoxical to take a look at the present to better understand the future. The key idea to keep in mind here is that rather than focusing on trends on the surface, it is worth digging deeper to identify the structural and enduring phenomena that could have a lasting effect on the landscape. There are different ways to think about this tool and perhaps a couple of metaphors could help. The first metaphor: it’s like driving a car. The dashboard in a car provides all the indicators you need to adjust your driving. The second metaphor: it’s like taking the temperature with a thermometer. The information that a thermometer provides is usually indicative of the situation you find yourself in and can thus help you adjust your current approach accordingly. It is noteworthy that in both instances, driving a car and taking the temperature, the role of the analyst is crucial in interpreting the result, in confronting it to the landscape and in making the necessary adjustments. After all, driving at 100 km/h is not the same in a city or on a highway! In other words, feedback is less about collecting the information and more about interpreting it. Indeed, feedback is about transforming raw information and data, indicators and signposts into meaningful pieces of a puzzle. In practice, this can be implemented in various ways. First, you should start asking other people when you don’t know. Think about how, for instance, some media outlets facing limited resources in an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world have looked to outsource their reporting relying on what private citizens are able to report via portable devices and share via social networks. Ultimately, this is a way for media outlets to catch global trends that only a very costly and almost impossible omnipresence across the world would otherwise bring. Of course, we are tempted to think, and rightly so, that the quality of the information matters very much. The value, in this case is derived from testimonies in theaters that could be hard to reach otherwise. Let’s think about how replicable this is. Can you think of other industries that have relied on this approach? Pause this video for a moment and think about it. You may have come up with various answers of industries relying heavily on outsourcing. But think as well about how people looked in that work. Often, this is about finding a job. But it can also be about keeping in touch with people that are much more knowledgeable than they are on very specific issues. You could also experiment. Think about how some businesses are trying new experiments and are trying to understand other stakeholders’ incentives, as well as what may be keeping them up at night. You’ve read and listened how some of these experiments in which companies are looking to uncover “hidden gems”, identify new and meaningful ideas and confirm existing ones that are not yet public. You’ve also thought about how some firms look to foster creative thinking among their ranks. Give a person with a unique individual experience the opportunity to use her unique thermometer and you could potentially unleash a lot of creative power. In all of these cases, through experiment, you are looking to understand the most telling features of the landscape, that is, those features that may not be apparent on the surface but that are the most likely to weigh in the future. Finally, you could try to aggregate a wide range of point of views through prediction markets. Much has been written on crowdsourcing and its efficiency. And you’ve had the opportunity to read about it. Ultimately, consider the basic goals of prediction markets to aggregate information from a wide range of stakeholders and key observers who, again, have a unique point of view of what is going on. Like stock markets that generate prices for assets that are, in theory at least, indicative of future cash flows, a prediction market can be a synthetic tool providing a snapshot of the mood regarding a particular question. Before we conclude, let’s think about the main takeaways of this section. In practice, what is feedback about? A) Is it about driving a car? B) Is it about taking the temperature by talking to people? C) And is it about experimenting to better understand your landscape? You can select more than one answer. The answers are B and C, of course. In fact, if you’re still with me, I think it will be clear to you that in practice, feedback is about taking the temperature which you can do by talking to other people, experimenting, and/or relying on prediction markets. Ultimately, this should help you find the right indicators to anticipate, adjust and guarantee the long-term sustainability of an organization. The bottom line? Nothing is static. Constant strategic adjustments are required as a result. Feedback can help you confirm that your strategy will guarantee your long-term agility. It is a tool designed to best anticipate and adjust to deep, structural trends.
