Foresight Styles Assessment, Part 1
Hi All,
I haven’t written in awhile, but that’s what happens when graduate school is only a few weeks away from the end of the fall semester.
I already have a few other articles in the works, but I’ve also been wanting to start a series on Foresight Styles Assessment tools for quite a while, because such a process can help individuals and teams understand not only where they are presently in their future-orientation, but also how that can become more transformative – as well as what can be done to transition their entire group to greater openness concerning innovation, change, and normative futures that position them for strategic advantage and aspirational development. In today’s environment of uncertainty and ever-emerging creative destruction, these traits are not just helpful, but imperative!
The tool of the same name was developed by FSA director Natalie Dian, and she commented that, “Foresight Styles Assessment (FSA) exists due to the increasing pace of change while having to think long-range and understand possible consequences of decisions. At the organization level, it indicates change strategies for all types of organization change. Based upon research and new insights, FSA helps individuals understand themselves and their motivations enabling better workplace relations. FSA elaborates the roles we all play in when we find ourselves facing the new and the innovative.” (p. 1).
As Dian noted, thinking, insight, and action-logics are vital to foresight, and an important part of any foresight measurement tool in leadership and teams would stem from individual and group cognitive styles and function. This connection helps to place such measurement within a theoretical context that enables a better understanding and development of style assessments, and one such method that fits the bill is the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory.
Foxall stated that,
“Kirton (1976) advanced a theory that individuals typically exhibit one of 2 distinct styles of problem solving and decision making: adaption or innovation. Since Kirton’s research was done on engineers, another study was conducted to examine if these problem-solving categories can be applied to a broader range of managerial groups. Subjects included 115 mid-career managers who were attending a one-year master of business administration program at a major business school in the UK. Each participant completed the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory. Results indicated that most, if not all, broadly defined managerial functions were divisible into adaptive and innovative task subsets. Therefore, there is a need to appreciate the existence of adaptive and innovative subgroups within general occupational/professional categories, rather than relying on standard classification and job descriptions” (p. 24).
I’ll purposefully leave the posts in this series short so that they are easy to swallow, and can generate some feedback. Suffice it to say for now that understanding foresight styles can help an organization and its leaders (locally and globally) to generate a greater learning environment and to work with the various styles that are already present within their group members to form a more conducive collaborative experience for both risk management and aspirational creation.
References:
Dian, N. (2007). Foresight styles assesment. Retrieved on November 15th, 2007 from http://www.foresightstyles.com/.
Foxall, G. R. (1986). Managerial orientations of adaptors and innovators. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 1(2), 24-27.
