Hands‐on or Heads‐up? Strategic Foresight as the Heart of the Board's Work

• Date: 01 September 2018
• Author: Jannice Moore
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/bl.30116
• Published date: 01 September 2018

SEPT.–OCT. 2018 7

Hands-on or Heads-up?

Strategic Foresight as the

Heart of the Board’s Work

By Jannice Moore

Jannice Moore is president of The Governance Coach, a Calgary, Alberta, Canada–

based rm that specializes in Policy Governance consultation and coaching. In this

article, Moore looks at the interplay between strategic planning, strategic thinking,

and, ultimately, strategic foresight.

Is your board hands-on or heads-up?

Being a hands-on board—focus-

ing on operational details, providing

approvals, listening to CEO reports—is

much easier. The downside is that your

organization is left with no one provid-

ing the vital strategic foresight neces-

sary for your organization to survive,

let alone thrive, in our rapidly changing

world.

In 1677, the Dutch philosopher

Baruch Spinoza suggested that

wisdom is seeing things in view of

eternity. As Michael McKinney (2005)

describes Spinoza’s perspective, “A

foundational principle of wisdom is to

have a long term perspective; to see

the big picture; to look beyond the

immediate situation.” Robert Green-

leaf (1991, p.18) maintained that

failure to foresee is an “ethical failure,

because serious ethical compromises

today (when the usual judgment on

ethical inadequacy is made) are usually

the result of a failure at an earlier date

to foresee today’s events and take the

right actions when there was freedom

for initiative to act.”

Internationally known author on

business and management from McGill

University Henry Mintzberg (1987)

has said that “strategic planning is an

oxymoron.” He goes on to say that

strategy cannot be planned because

planning is about analysis while strat-

egy is about synthesis. Synthesis is

about combining diverse concepts into

a coherent whole.

I propose that the board’s key

role is much more about synthesis

than analysis. Thus, to maintain clar-

ity, boards need to make a distinction

between strategic planning and strate-

gic thinking. The latter focuses on set-

ting strategic direction. The purpose

of strategic thinking is to exercise stra-

tegic foresight.

Noted futurist Ruben Nelson (2015)

describes strategic foresight as “the

personal, group and societal capaci-

ties/culture that enables us to make

and live by strategic commitments in

the present that are wise and context-

sensitive enough to survive context

change and actually co-create a more

deeply desirable future.” Why should a

board care about this?

Let’s take a step back in time—the

future is always connected to the

past. The derivation of the very word

“governance” comes from the Latin

gubernare, which in turn was derived

from the Greek kubernetes. In ancient

times, the kubernetes was the person

on the sailing ship who pointed out

the direction the ship was to go and

watched for dangerous shoals. He

provided direction and protection.

Today, millennia later, those are still

the key functions of a board—provid-

ing direction and protection for the

organization. In Policy Governance,

this is accomplished through the use of

Ends policies (direction) and Executive

Limitations policies (protection from

imprudent and unethical means).

To fulfill these responsibilities, the

board cannot be mired in the details

of current-day operations—it needs

to be the lookout, doing the best pos-

sible job of foreseeing what may be

coming in the future. The best way I

can put this into context is to share

several diagrams from Ruben Nel-

son’s work (Nelson, 2015). In these

diagrams, think of the triangle as your

organization.

Figure 1 illustrates your organiza-

tion. Figure 2 shows your organiza-

tion’s most common connections, the

way it spends its days. In Figure 3, we

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