Politics: Trend or Swing?

Politics today – particularly federal executive branch politics – has introduced historic levels of uncertainty for many organizational leaders.

And yet, despite such great uncertainty, leaders still need to make decisions in the face of that uncertainty.  How they make those decisions can be a source of anxiety and frustration.

For example, should you think about policy and regulation like it’s a trend, moving in a particular direction over time?  Or should you think about it like it is an oscillating dynamic, swinging back and forth between two directions?

If you choose “trend,” then you are assuming things will, over time, continue to move in a particular direction, usually expanding or deepening over time.  If you choose “oscillating,” then you are assuming the future will be a series of reversals.

Those assumptions of course frame the priorities and investments you decide to make today.

What should you do?  One approach is to think in terms of your balance point between shaping and hedging strategies.  In other words, balancing your plans in terms of going all in on a major assumption and hedging in case that assumption turns out to be wrong.

Note: being a foresight firm, which is oriented towards identifying more of what is possible in the future, we will never endorse assuming there is only one possible future.

For instance, you can consider the following options:

1. Decide things are trending and therefore balance your plans toward taking advantage of that trend, while reserving some modest contingency planning for the possibility of oscillation.  Your strategy is probably some form of optimizing for a particular type of future.

2. Decide things are oscillating and balance your strategy and your organizational capabilities toward navigating an environment that alternates between supportive and antagonistic.  Your strategy likely has more to do with resilience and flexibility than in option #1.  You would reserve some modest bandwidth in your ongoing strategic conversation to monitor for specific signals that things are in fact trending in a particular direction.

3. Remain undecided whether things will trend or oscillate, balancing your plans toward an extreme of hedging.  Choosing to keep as many options open as you can.  Your “strategy” here is likely less a traditional strategy (pick a direction and pursue it) and more about maximizing your choices and actively managing them as the world changes around you.  Cautious incrementalism – founded on high uncertainty – probably feels most comfortable here.

Obviously, there are risks (and differing potential upsides) to each of these choices.  And making informed, rational choices in the face of the uncertainty of the future is certainly possible.

Regardless of the choice you make, from a foresight point of view, your team should have in place a system or process to actively monitor the changing landscape, with the ability to quickly feed those insights into the leadership team’s ongoing strategic conversation.  That is how you can course correct should the planning assumptions you built your strategy on turn out to be wrong.

As always, contact us today to discuss how we can help assess these and other trends and set up your team’s strategic conversation.