As a senior leader, you like to become visible for your forward thinking & current achievements.
You find it easier in living & expressing
Your past achievements
Optimisation measures
Excellence initiatives
When someone asks you to envision where would you like to see yourself & your teams in the future, some discomfort sets in.
What if I am wrong?
How on earth do I know?
It is not certain yet
Will people think it's all in the air?
Where is the grounding?
While the future is inherently uncertain, the major discomfort comes from:
Lack of comprehensive knowledge in the industry
The need to be always right
The need to have control, ambiguity averse
Execution bias
What can help you expand your vision for the future?
Prospection is the mental process of projecting & evaluating future possibilities and then using these projections to guide thought & action. ~Tomorrowmind, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman & Martin SeligmanAccording to them, there are 2 phases in Prospection:
Creation of the wishful future
Evaluation & Action.
In my experience in coaching, I find a set of executives who do creation very well but struggle to evaluate & implement their ideas. I also find another set who hold a strong beliefs that they cannot be creative and hence cannot come up with the wishful future. Only a small percentage can do both well and no wonder they are pretty successful in strategic roles.
If you want to increase your visibility to key strategic roles, the question to ask is:
Do you want to be in the mind space for strategic roles?
Are you willing to learn prospection in the present?
The best news is you could learn both the skills. Are you ready?