Optimal Leadership  by Wayne M. Angel, Ph.D.
The Optimal Organization: Establish Foresight















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Optimal Leadership
  The Optimal Organization
 
    From Where the 5 Critical Factors?
      The 5 Critical Factors
      Understand Who Wants What
      Find a Solution
      Apply the Skills
      Establish Feedback
      Establish Foresight
          Can We Predict the Future?
          Two Tools

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  Creating the Optimal Organization
  The Optimal Change Agent


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Despite the extreme importance of feedback, it does have a significant weakness.  It can only provide feedback on what is.  When we add forecasting to feedback a minor miracle occurs.  We get feedback on what will be.  Feedback works well to hit a moving target as long as the target is moving as expected.  That is why attack aircraft under fire add random course changes to their flight pattern. 

In Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon comments that, "The Jedi Knight appears to have lightning fast reflexes because through the force he anticipates what his opponent will do." In the real world of combat the undefeated 15th century Samurai, Miyamoto Musashi said, "to become undefeatable, speed is not important.  The truly superior strategist never appears to be in a hurry.  He is slow and deliberate.  You must learn to anticipate your opponent.  In this way you will appear to be fast."

Can it be done?  Star Wars is only fiction.  On the other hand Musashi survived more than 60 combats, sometimes defeating up to 10 simultaneous opponents.  In his day the duels were usually fought to the death.  He claimed his strategy made him undefeatable.  You might say he took the scientific position of testing his theory to the extreme.  I think it worth investigating his claim that anticipating what will happen is a major part of making you undefeatable.  In any case, if he were alive today, I would not challenge his claim.

I titled this section Foresight and Preparation.  Obviously foresight is of no use unless it is used to prepare for will happen next.  We have already discussed Knowing What to Do, which of course cannot be done well without foresight.  Planning and forecasting go together.  You cannot plan without forecasting.  You can forecast without subsequent planning, but that would be contrary to our fundamental human nature.  In the Section Knowing What to Do, I focused on planning.  Here the focus is on forecasting.  The first question to answer is, "Can we do it?"

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