Editor’s note: The following is a transcript from the latest episode of “Therefore, What?” It has been edited for clarity.
Boyd Matheson: Many individuals and organizations are hunkering down in the midst of the current coronavirus crisis and economic upheaval, but the essential trait for leading a business, a community or a country through any crisis is vision. Author and business strategist Mark Johnson joins us to discuss his new book, “Lead from the Future,” on this episode of “Therefore, What?”
Mark Johnson is co-founder and senior partner of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company, which he co-founded with Harvard Business School professor, the late Clayton Christensen. He’s been a strategic adviser to both Global 1000 and startup companies across the country and around the world, and we are very excited to have Mark join us. Mark, thanks so much for joining us today.
Mark Johnson: Thank you, Boyd. It’s great to be here.
BM: Well, when I saw the title of your book, I immediately said, “we’ve got to do a podcast with Mark.” The timing of your book is just perfect, and the substance of it is so rich — there’s so many applications that I just want to dive right in. And I will warn everyone, this may be a four-hour podcast, but we’ll try to keep it to the essence as we go through today. So, tell me the essence. What’s the beginning of this whole process, as you look at this idea of “lead from the future,” and really getting to vision as such a critical principle?
MJ: Well, Boyd, the main principle is the antidote to all the shortsightedness that goes around — not just in business, but in government and nonprofits and society — as the world’s become, using an army term, more VUCA: more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And certainly, COVID-19 has made that even more real. We tend, as human beings, to just hunker down and focus on the here and now and plan out from today. And while there is obviously an important piece to how we live day to day, of living in the present, we’re missing out on what we can learn from the future. We can indeed learn from the future, in terms of what trends and other things inform about the five- to 10-year horizon, and in the case of COVID, even in the next couple of years.
So the whole point of starting this book, and how it ties to our work in innovation, was with vision — and a vision that’s more than just a simple statement, and we can talk about that — vision helps bring an organization its purpose, its hope, its inspiration and its perspective. That allows for it to be able to start planning and developing things, planting seeds for the future, while at the same time addressing the here and now. So, vision was a mechanism for really trying to enable longer-term thinking that’s so essential to keep us ahead of things like the pandemic. Not to say that we could have stopped it, but some anticipation of it could have been to our benefit, had we been able to really drive as a society and the government and business to look further ahead.
BM: I think that’s so critical. And again, especially in a crisis, vision is just so essential, because it’s just so easy. And I see this everywhere, where you have people who just get into that “hunker down, and we’re just going to survive today, and maybe we’ll think about tomorrow, tomorrow.” You look at it more from a historic perspective of, look, it’s those who decide to lean into the stiff wind of the crisis, where most of the great breakthroughs, break-withs, innovation and legendary organization actually happen.
MJ: That’s exactly right. You know the story about Steve Jobs and Apple. When he came back to Apple, having left the company he co-founded in the late ’90s, it wasn’t long after when the dot-com crash happened. And even before the dot-com crash, Apple was facing a lot of headwinds in terms of its niche, high-end personal computers. Many were saying it was going to commoditize. So the combination of that and the crisis, in spite of all that negative news and pressure on the here and now, he used that as an opportunity with his top lieutenants to look out 10 years. And basically, through the vision of what was called a “digital hub,” going past the computer, enabled Apple to transform from a computer company to a consumer electronics company. And it was that vision and it was that ability, even in the time of crisis.
I mentioned in the book — to your point about being historical — we know of these visionary leaders, and many of them were etched into their fame and into their reputation as demonstrating vision and in times of real darkness. Like Winston Churchill inspiring the British during the worst times of World War II, and Nelson Mandela, what he led for the resistance to apartheid. We have a whole number of visionaries —our own FDR, during the times of both the Depression and World War II — it was the aspect of their visionary thinking and leading that was critical, along with the practicality of actually mobilizing people and resources to address the crisis at hand.
BM: I just love that. I’m always looking back. I have this framing of, “The past is a present for our future.” I was going through with my son the other day — we actually went back to the old classic, “Think and Grow Rich,” which was a 1937 publication date on that. But it was interesting. Napoleon Hill said that we’re coming out of this economic crisis and the world has changed. And we need people with vision who are going to give us new ideas, new literature, new marketing, new products, new opportunities — it even said new radio. So, you know, even in 1937. But again, all of those, as you mentioned, Lincoln and Churchill and FDR, they were all leaning into that stiff wind and having a vision of where they were going to lead following the crisis.
MJ: Absolutely. Tying it to practicality of vision, and especially in the work that we do with corporations, to make this actually tangible and real for leaders and organizations, we prescribe this vision as not just a corporate vision statement, tied with a mission statement that’s done as a half-day exercise. It’s taking and developing a true narrative about what could and should be coming out the other end, and putting it tied where the environment is going and how you can fit in that environment. Not only to be in it, but to actually shape in it.
We like to use the analogy of Wayne Gretzky, who talked about, as a hockey player, “my success is because I skate, not where the puck is, but where the puck is going.” We take it one step further and say, “not only skate to where you think the puck is going, but look out so that you can help shape where the puck should go.”
There’s a great quote, I forgot the gentleman’s name, but he said, “futures can’t be predicted, but they can be invented.” I think that’s a powerful way to think about this whole point of the importance of vision, especially in the time when we’re going to deal with so many things that are going to fundamentally change in the not-too-distant future, and how are we going to prepare for that? And take it to our benefit as individuals, as members in a business or in a nonprofit organization, or as a society as a whole.
BM: I love that. The future can be invented. I think that is just fantastic. One of the things that you mentioned in the book that I want our listeners to really grab on — and this is one of those I’m throwing out as a triple-dog-dare to our podcast listeners today — and that is, you suggest that we need to be spending 10% to 20% of our time dealing with that vision, that essence, creating that narrative. And I would just add, whether that’s with a business, an organization, a family or your personal organization, the most important meetings you’re ever going to have are the ones with yourself. Give us a little drill-down on that. So, 10% to 20% of our time focusing on envisioning the future. What does that look like?
MJ: Sure. Well, one, the importance is that the 10% to 20% of the time is putting yourself in a in a whole different way of thinking. But it’s also kind of a different process. Where our typical day — and I’m speaking in large measure to leaders and management teams within an organization — they may spend that with what we would call a lot of “operate and execute activities,” you know, reviewing budgets, reviewing operations of different sorts. It’s very much fast-paced, give-me-information, let-me-make-decisions. And again, that’s going to be a big piece of your time. And nobody’s arguing with the urgency of so much of that.
But there’s a difference between urgent and vital. And there’s a vital piece, which is to be able to look and discern ahead the information and understanding that you can start putting in place to plan ahead. That 10% to 20% is not “operate and execute.” The learning mode there is to open up the mind to explore and to envision the possible, and then develop what needs to be done today, although some of it in an experimental form to discover what things are true about what you envision and what things don’t pan out and how you can adjust.
So, that 10% to 20% has to be carved out, because it’s about creating the space to be able to define what things could be and what things should be. It starts to develop a point of view, and that point of view can be very powerful. I have a futurist colleague who says, “You want to try to develop a foresight, which then can lead to an insight, which then leads to a course of action.” And he says that once you have that insight — this is Bob Johansen from the Institute of the Future — you can never go back. And so that’s the key — to use that time to develop some insight that get incorporated with the things that you have to do for the here and now.
Again, it’s this difference between what’s really urgent and what’s really vital. And we suffer from the tyranny of the urgent, and this looking, at least for part of our time, to look ahead, to be forward-looking, to develop a vision — while it may never be urgent, and that’s the problem — we find that it’s vital. Because without it, you’re not prepared to make those course changes that you need to make, which need to start today in order to be ready for how they’re going to ultimately be realized a couple of years or more in the future.
BM: Those are powerful, powerful principles, I want to come back to those in just a second, in terms of the next step in how you take that vision and start walking it back and getting it into the here and now. But before we go on that portion, I want to back up just a little bit. I think your background and the things that you’ve done around the world — in terms of really helping organizations create cultures of change and growth and renewal — I want to spend just a minute on two things. One, I want to talk about your relationship with Clayton Christensen, who we lost way too soon. Just a quick reflection there on his influence as a visionary and as a thinker, who changed so many organizations and so many individuals.
MJ: You know, it’s hard to not get emotional talking about Clay, because he changed my life professionally and personally. He was a dear friend and obviously a colleague. We co-founded our firm together in 2000, so 20 years ago. He introduced me to his faith and I became part of that, along with all the things that we did professionally.
He was a visionary. I dedicated the book to him, in the sense that he took the principles of disruptive innovation, and said that this was good theory that could help make predictions about how things should work and what that would mean in the future. What I particularly loved about him as an individual and the work was, it wasn’t just about helping companies be profitable, but it was helping them be sustainable and making the world a better place. The whole work of disruption that we continue to do together, the focus more became about how do you not only democratize products and services, but how do you empower people to to grow and flourish. And that, in fact, was one of his later books that I’m sure many in your audience have read, but his book on how will you measure your life.
You know, it’s really the application of the power of helping individuals achieve better outcomes. And this book is meant to try to further that work. The long-term perspective of the vision is part of the enablement of being able to get outside of traditional ways of doing things, but being able to do for the positive these disruptive innovations that actually help the world become a better place.
BM: I appreciate you sharing that, Mark. A lot of us have felt that absence of Clayton Christensen’s presence, but I think we’ve all realized that he, through his principles and teachings, infused so much of himself into everyone who ever heard or listened or read what he created, or participated with him in any kind of engagement. He has gone through that disruptive innovation of death. But he knows that’s part of the program in moving us all forward continually. Just a really powerful thing. I appreciate you sharing that.
I want to get a little bit on your background, Mark, for our listeners to get some interesting insight. I think as you look at your theory and your focus here on leading from the future, I’ve got to figure out, how did you go from a degree in aerospace engineering from the United States Naval Academy to having these kind of conversations with Clayton Christensen? That’s a leap to the future, for sure.
MJ: Well, it also shows, Boyd, we definitely can be more forward-looking and use that to guide us, but there’s also always going to be an emergent part of our lives and an emergent part of organizations. And in sort of marrying those two together, I will just say, part of it is the work of sharing the concepts of the book. You come to learn more about these things and about yourself as you answer these questions. And I hadn’t thought about it before, until being on a few podcasts and interviews.
My mom was an opera singer, so she had a very artistic side to her, needless to say. She was a mezzo-soprano and sang for a whole bunch of different opera companies. And my dad was a pilot. He was a former World War II pilot and a Korea pilot and engineer, mathematically oriented. I feel like I got a little bit of a combination, because I went to the Naval Academy and was very much in engineering. But I always think I had a creative and imaginative design side to me, as well.
And so long story short is, when I decided to leave the Navy for various reasons in the nuclear power program, I really liked aspects in business around general management, but also innovation. When I went went to Harvard Business School and met Clay, that got me into the innovation space as a student. And then we stayed in touch, and we came together to form Innosight. And my view that comes through in the book is that vision is, in many ways, the art. It’s the storytelling. It’s the creative power of anything — of visioning an enterprise, or envisioning a new product or service or business or opportunity.
But then you have to change from a storyteller and imaginative person to an engineer, and convert that into choices that you have to make in a portfolio of initiatives, we would call it. So in the book, I combined, “What does it mean to be a storyteller?” And then, “How do you shift to an engineer to actually program ideas into the organization and actually make them happen?” So, I don’t know if that fully answers the question, but basically, that’s how it came all together for me, both and working with Clay and then developing the book.
BM: I love that. And that leads us right into where I want to go next, in terms of how do we actually apply this. You and your co-author, Josh Suskewicz , you go through this idea — I love this idea of the practical visionary. Too often, visionaries get a bad rap of “head-in-the-clouds, blue sky, shoot-the-moon” possibility stuff, but we’ve got to have some practicality to it. I think it was T.E. Lawrence who called them “dreamers of the day.” The dreamers of the day are the dangerous ones, because they actually make their dreams a reality. In the book, you use the term “future-back.” So give us some of that reverse engineering, from the vision, to how do we actually make it happen?
MJ: Well, future-back has two parts to it. One is the way of thinking, and then it’s the actual process. On the way of thinking, as we’ve been talking about it, it’s really having the opportunity for a moment to break free of the past and the present, and to imagine what could be in the future, without too much dependency on the way things work here now. It isn’t to say that you don’t bring certain expertise and principles and capabilities from the way things work today, but you’re really trying to bring yourself into the future and develop a clear point of view.
In our business terms, we would say, market to the future in the role that your organization can play in that new and different world. So, you’re really trying to form a vivid, system-level understanding of the organization, as opposed to just a simple statement. So, that’s one aspect of future-back, is to clean-sheet, to think systemically, to think more than just a statement, but to imagine how the future could be. Like Steve Jobs imagining beyond just a personal computer, to what he called the digital hub and these consumer electronics.
The other part of future-back, beyond this design, clean-sheet kind of thinking, is the literal process of walking back. It’s this classic starting with the end in mind and working backwards. You start 10 years out. You begin to think about what that vision could be. And then you walk back in increments and say, if in 2030, this is what we need to look like, then in 2028, we have to have these things in place, and we need to look like this if we’re going to achieve 2030, and then so forth, you go back to 2026. So that literal walking back from the future to what you would do today creates a better understanding of what’s really needed than if you had done it from today out.
This especially matters when you’re trying to think about what needs to be in place in the future — not just extending what you have today in your core business, which are your core operations, which no one is arguing that you wouldn’t keep doing that as well. It’s just a matter of how do you do both.
BM: I had one question for you. There’s one component in terms of this future-back. You talked about clean-sheeting and how that forces you to really get to the specifics there. One of the wonderful byproducts of following this kind of process and vision is it helps you decide what to invest in. And I think, for a lot of our listeners, that may not necessarily be just an investment of dollars and cents — it may be an investment of time or emotion, as you’re either leading yourself or leading a group, we often think of investments strictly in dollars, but there’s a lot of things we ask people to invest in. And vision is one of those, right?
MJ: No, it’s absolutely true. You know, we talk a lot about the term “resource allocation,” that what leaders do in organizations is they’re ultimately responsible to allocate precious resources. And those resources are not just dollars. You know, it’s people as a resource, and it’s people’s time and it’s people’s expenditure of energy.
Really, what you’re trying to do is be more thoughtful about how you invest precious time and people and money to things that aren’t going to pay off immediately today, but are going to be critically vital for the future. Being able to get a greater insight about why you would make a decision to take some of that precious management time and dollars and people and carve it out, that ability to stay the course with that carve-out of resources, is why we talk about vision so much in planning further out and walking it back.
Because the way it’s often done today is many companies and organizations will have an instinct that they’ve got to prepare to do things beyond their core way of doing things. But they only think about it pushing from the present to the future. And by doing that, they don’t really have that story, that narrative, that point of view that helps stay the course with the time it takes for new and different initiatives to work their way through and grow and scale into something that’s very meaningful for the organization.
BM: Just a couple of quick-hitters here — I’ll have you take us through this concept. One of the concepts is that you have to be prepared to learn and pivot. How does vision help you to do that in a rapidly changing environment?
MJ: Well, I would think about it as three pieces. One is the “learn and pivot” component of how this works. The other is the actual initiatives and things that you actually would be learning about that you do today. And then the third is the vision piece that we talked about.
The vision is the North Star. It’s the inspiration and the hope of the organization. It’s the direction that you want to go. And yes, like in the COVID crisis, we’re going to deal with turbulent waters for the next year or two. That should inform your vision, but it shouldn’t overtake it. Your vision should go past that. So, the vision piece gets developed as a point of view, in more than the statement that I said. You walk that back through making choices in the future, and then walking it back to the choices you make today.
But you’re not done with either the vision or the things that you’re going to do today, both for the core business, but then also for the new and different. The operative word is “learning” and “rapid learning.” You have to take these initiatives, and especially for new growth, you have to be in an experimentation mode. You want to spend a little to learn a lot. You want to be focused on what’s working, what’s not working and rapidly decide to shut down what’s not working so you can then focus on the things that are working.
“That’s my plea for all of us — that we can combine being forward-looking, being visionary and being practical.” — Mark Johnson
As you move this whole concept forward in time, and as we actually go forward in time, you’re going to learn things and you’re going to shape this vision. It’s not a one-and-done. That’s the other piece of this. This is not an exercise you do once every five years. Once you develop a compelling, practical vision, the organization, the leadership should be reviewing this every — now, it would be every few weeks, because things are happening fast — but at least once a quarter, revisiting and saying, What have we learned? How does that influence what we’re prioritizing today, both for our here-and-now and for our future? And how would we need to adjust our vision as we gain more insights and our future comes in touch with the reality of today?
BM: Absolutely love that. Well, Mark, we’re to the point where we ask the main point of the program, “Therefore, What?” People have been listening for 25 minutes here and have been given some wonderful things. What’s the “therefore, what” takeaway? How do you hope people think different? What do you hope they do different after listening to this podcast today?
MJ: I would hope that we’d have a permanent change in the way that we think about how we lead organizations, and for that matter, how we lead our lives. We’re in a place where the world is moving faster. It’s back to volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, the army term VUCA. And with that world, we can no longer afford to just be living in the here and now. We need to make a permanent change in our culture and our leadership, which means we need to, for once and for all, be forward-looking, have a way to be forward-looking, have it a part of our lives, in addition to what we have to do in the day-to-day.
Because if we’re not anticipating, not just things that slowly change, but things that disrupt just like this pandemic, we’re not going to be as well-prepared as we could be, and we’re not going to create the sustainability for our world and for us as individuals The world just happens to have too many uncertainties and too many things that happen too fast.
So, that’s my plea for all of us — that we can combine being forward-looking, being visionary and being practical about it, not just for a few select people, with the realities that we have to live in the here and now and we have to operate and execute day to day.
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