This section is still under construction.

Key Design Principles

It's very easy to do the wrong thing really well, especially in rapidly changing contexts, where the tendency to apply old approaches and outdated ideas to new problems is rife In a rush to come up with answers and quickly, decision-makers end looking at the problem too narrowly and thus pick the least robust options, even causing more harm than success in retrospect.

By contrast, Adaptive Edge enables clients to slow down to go fast. As this means is creating a space to reframe problems and possibilities at a much higher and deeper level.

2. Taking a Systemic View.

We believe better futures and better problem solving happens when we look at the whole system for leverage points of change and influence. Most big changes affecting organizations come from outside the organization. The vectors are usually a complicated mix of shifting values, political developments, financial regimes and regulators, economic cycles, new technologies and cultural trends. A globalized and networked world ensures that these drivers of change affect organizations faster and more decisively than every before.

3. Leveraging the Whole Person

4. Surfacing Assumptions

"There are two sets of future, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them."- Desmond Bernal, historian (1929)

Learning to anticipate the future and develop wise strategies is not just an informational problem, but also a cognition and perception problem, which is why we are often confronted with "inevitable surprises"Ñ developments that we should have anticipated but failed to do so in time. Why does this happen? Many leaders miss the signals of change because they hold an outdated Òmental mapÓ or set of assumptions and beliefs about how the business is changing and the nature of risks ahead.

As Watkins and Bazerman tells us, managers fail to anticipate key changes around them because 1) of psychological or cognitive barriers 2) organizational barriers and 3) political or decision-making processes block the process.

Half the battle is simply recognizing that these dynamics can create dangerous blindspots and vulnerabilities for an organization or individual. So good strategic foresight often involves a sophisticated understanding of the psychology of an organization and their decision-makers.

A key skill to that end is the art and science of surfacing assumptions. This practice is increasingly important these days because many assumptions are shifting on many different levels at different speeds. These include assumptions about our business model, our employees and organizational structure, our competitors, customers, stability of certain markets and regulatory regimes, and so on.

So how do we surface assumptions in practice? Learning theory tells us that we canÕt easily do this directly because many of these assumptions are tacit and thus unconscious to us -- or they are so embedded in the culture of an organization that they are taken for granted. To overcome this, what works well is a pedagogical technique called outside-in thinking. This is a heuristic where one starts from the broader contextual environment and works inwards through the other layers of assumptions (e.g. industry dynamics) until we reach our own individual assumptions about the world and how this may impact how we perceive the business.

Other methods which can help us dig down to these assumption is a strategic conversation or dialogue process. Adaptive Edge often Teaches managers and leaders how to facilitate and structure such a conversation.

Scenario thinking, coupled with a learning journey or field trip designed, is another powerful way to get people thinking and acting differently. Learning journeys are highly customized field trips designed to stretch peopleÕs perceptions of how their markets might be changing. Given their experiential nature, learning journeys truly get people Òout of the boxÓ and challenge core assumptions about what is and isnÕt possible.