For more years than I want to remember, Jane & I have been facilitating organization’s strategic direction & business planning using an approach referred to as “standing in the future.” People involved in the planning (preferably everyone who will be implementing the plan, & not just senior management), “position” themselves or “stand” in their desired future. The more details they can articulate about that future, the better, describing how they are interacting with clients, what they are doing, the logistics, facilities, even the smells & sounds. The excitement of bringing that future alive, in their minds & discussions, propels the planning exercise. Rather than defining steps to be taken to get TO the future, usually 3 years out, this process determines the steps needed to get “back from the future” to the present (with apologies to Michael J. Fox’s “back to the future”).

One of the advantages of having 2 delayed flights in yesterday’s storm was that I finally finished Rotman’s Magazine, which, along with Harvard Business Review, is a “must” read. Russell Ackoff’s “Point of View” in this issue focuses on “Idealized Design” which is really another name “standing in the future.” As Ackoff says, “Visionary planners” - hey Jane! we’re visionary! - “plan backward from where they want to be to where they are now; and they plan not for the future, but for what they want their organizaions to be at the present time.” Yep, he’s absolutely right - and well worth reading. You can read the magazine online or get free copies at Rotman on St. George St. in Toronto - right across the street from the Faculty of Information Studies and Robarts Libraries - both places worth visiting (wink) &, of course, taking a course at PLC. ahem.

I also got to read “Enterprise 2.0″ by Andrew McAfee, in which he talks about the platforms companies can buy or build to make “visible the practices and outputs of their knowlege workers” using the acronym SLATES: search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals (rss, aggregators, etc.). I’m enticed by stumbleupon.com. Anyone tried it? “Over time,” McAfee writes, it “matches preferences to send users only sites they’ll like.” Cool - count me in.