Taking Our Heads Above The Clouds

Well, here we are. Another summer done. Another back-to-school season out of the way. Another count-down to Christmas on the horizon. Which means it’s also time for business leaders to start thinking about the year ahead. But forward-planning somehow feels harder than it used to be. Whether you’re running a coffee shop or a global consultancy, it’s harder than ever to confidently predict what’s coming next. In the last 12 months alone we’ve seen surprising technological advances, rapidly evolving consumer needs and a steep rise in competition across nearly every market. Most businesses are being forced to diversify and prepare for futures they can barely envision. And those tried and trusted methods, are feeling increasingly unreliable. So how do you plan now for the next year, 3 years, 5 years in what we’ve all become weary of calling the ‘new normal’?

Allow me to present the 3 C’s of planning: Collaboration, Clairvoyance and Creativity.

I don’t know who said it first, or when, but it remains a truism – two heads are better than one. Collaboration is key, and great ideas can come from anywhere. But many of us find ourselves more alone in our jobs than ever before, not just because of remote and hybrid working, but teams are shrinking, and some have lost support due to restructuring, budget cuts or acquisitions. Some of you might even be flying solo in your functions or trying to cross-perform in a function outside your core expertise. So, how do you collaborate if you’re feeling isolated? Start by broadening your planning panel, across departments, seniority levels, even companies. Ideas won’t only come from people within your department – they’ll come from wherever you look for them.

While getting a diverse group of people together to think about the future is a good start, pulling your heads out of the day-to-day can still be tricky. And trying to think clearly and rationally about the future is even harder. Challenge your team to channel some clairvoyance as part of the process. Clairvoyance is more about intuition than seeing into the future. Educated speculation. Your gut feeling. Most of us these days are either firefighting or scrambling to keep up, stuck in the weeds of our jobs and unable to think further than next week or the next deadline. The trick is to wrench everyone out of that space, pop your collective head above the clouds and strive for some clarity and clairvoyance. The point is not to know what the future holds, but to be willing and able to imagine it – for the next 6 months, 12 months, 5 years. Which brings me to the third C: creativity.

The concept that creative thinking is critical to success, performance, innovation is nothing new. Yet Creativity is still marginalised as a skill, a tactic and a method. Many of us are most comfortable amongst facts and data from the past to inform our futures. But if imagination and creative thinking disappear, progress and innovation suffers, businesses struggle to differentiate themselves in an accelerating market, working harder instead of smarter and eventually fail. Data can take you so far, but creative thinking can take you literally anywhere.

One of the favourite parts of my job is that we get to bring together diverse teams and help lift our clients out of the day-to-day, even if just for an hour, to imagine what’s ahead and plan for it now. We love being the opportunity for everyone to think creatively. We love being the meeting or zoom call that clients actually look forward to, that they get excited about, that they walk away from energized instead of drained. And, possibly with a winning brand plan for 2024 in their back pocket.