From Strategy to Foresight: Future-Proofing Organizations

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the Strategy Gap, a show for leaders who want to bridge the gap between strategy creation and strategy execution. I'm Jonathan Morgan, and along with Joe Krauss, each episode we have conversations with strategy and operational leaders on key issues in strategic planning and strategy execution. If you're looking to actually accomplish your goals, this is the show for you. Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Strategy Gap. Joining us for today's conversation is Eric Schurr. Eric has an extensive career across various strategy roles, mostly in the financial sector, where he's led various initiatives to drive innovation and growth in the fintech space. He currently serves as a chief strategy officer at Sunrise Banks, where he leads the execution of the bank's mission to be the most innovative bank in the industry. Eric is also a certified foresight practitioner where he leverages strategic foresight to help organizations create and intercept their future.

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:59]:

Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Schurr [00:01:01]:

Well, thank you, Jonathan. Pleasure to be here.

Jonathan Morgan [00:01:03]:

Yeah, absolutely. So Eric, you obviously have a successful background and career so far, and there's a ton of information that we can dive into today or even future conversations for future podcasts. But really the focus of today's conversation and the focus of what stood out the most from our previous conversation. Realize your experience with strategic foresight. I think I've heard the term before, but admittedly I'm not fully aware of what the field is, everything that comes along with it, the practice, the methodology, and I imagine many of our listeners are in the same boat. So to start things off, when you talk about strategic foresight, what does that mean? Let's start with what the foundation of strategic foresight is.

Eric Schurr [00:01:42]:

Sure. So let's talk about strategy for just a minute, because strategy leads into the why of what foresight is and what foresight does. When we talk about strategy, we're really talking about the choices that a firm is going to make that's going to do two things. It's going to provide value to its customers and it's going to differentiate itself somehow in the marketplace. And strategy is always forward looking. It's always looking from today forward. So when we're talking about strategy, we're talking about actions we're going to take in the future. And the future is unknown.

Eric Schurr [00:02:19]:

And the unknown to many people can be a bit frightening. So what strategic foresight is, is it's a practice of processes and tools and disciplines that allow organizations to gather and process information about their future operating environment. So think about the world that they are going to be in. The many times today we see. I'll see financial institutions. I work a lot with community based financials, and I'll see community based financials that will, financial institutions that will come in with their annual strategy planning process. And what they'll do as part of that is I'll complete a SWOT analysis. And the opportunities and the threats, those are the external forces that are out there.

Eric Schurr [00:03:03]:

And the future is every day from today till forever. And it feels as though maybe the future should be considered in greater detail than the o and the t of the SWOT analysis. And so that's what foresight does.

Joe Krause [00:03:19]:

So you just mentioned using a SWOT analysis as a potential way to have a conversation about the future. Because the s and the w is an internally facing thing, and the o and the t is all about the external. In my experience, the SWOT analysis, it really depends on how well the organization knows what they're doing before they go into it. So in your experience, the organizations that have most effectively used a SWOT analysis, what do they look like? How do they leverage it? And organizations that maybe have fallen short, where the SWOT was just more of an exercise versus somebody they actually use, where do they fall short in your experience?

Eric Schurr [00:03:53]:

Yeah, thanks. When executives get into a room to discuss strategy and they're having this discussion around swote, they're coming in with their collective experience. And individually, what they're bringing is they're bringing extensive industry experience and potentially extensive functional experience as well. While this is great for the operation of the organization, it does present potential blind spots. And they really fall into two broad categories. The first is for each individual. Because they come in with such deep expertise within functions in the industry, they sometimes are unaware of the changes that are happening outside their industry that could have dramatic impacts inside their industry. An example is someone like Apple in the financial services industry, where twelve years ago, nobody was talking about Apple as being a competitor.

Eric Schurr [00:04:43]:

Today Apple is definitely a competitor in the financial services space. The second part of this too, is when we as organizations move to create strategy to become more efficient, to provide more personalized experiences to our customers, we tend to reduce complex problems into simpler forms. And we do this both in overt and covert ways, overtly. We do this through modeling, through data and analytics, and being a database decision making organization has tremendous advantage. And sometimes we use that in our strategy. What it does is it does reduce complex problems down to very simple sets of variables that we have the illusion that we can take and move and control and then see change. And now we've understood, or we begin to solve the issue that we're going after people that use SWOT analysis effectively. Take a broad look with deliberation prior to the exercise scan not only within their industry, but outside their industry.

Eric Schurr [00:05:55]:

Because if you ask an executive in any industry two questions, you know the answer already. Number one, is your industry being disrupted? Yes, absolutely it is. Is it being disrupted from inside or outside the industry? It's most often outside the industry. Nobody in the financial services industry is going to look at something that chase rolls out and goes, my gosh, why didn't we think of that? It's going to come from competitors and forces outside. So SWOT is interesting because you brought up Pestle earlier and SWOT, I think it draws a mental frame around the responses that we're looking for there. Pestle tends to get into a little more of the richness that some of these complex problems actually present to us. And ultimately what that does is it provides us creative opportunities to think of innovative ways to actually reach in and solve those problems for our customers.

Joe Krause [00:06:47]:

It makes a good point, because I did a large consulting engagement with a very large energy company that basically supplied energy to a certain state. And they had like a leadership academy. And I saw somebody working on almost like a business school case study, and I asked them what they were working on because I was interested, and this was about six years ago, they were looking at what happens if Tesla is successful at making batteries so cheap that every house has a battery attached to it and solar panels are in the roof. And basically, there isn't a need for your traditional energy company anymore. They're more of a kind of a relic of the past. So they were trying to even at that point, think through some of those disruptions that you spoke to, which you don't always see in every situation. There's one thing, it's one thing to say, yes, our industry is disruptive, but it also is another thing to actually invest resources so that leaders get ahead of said disruption and think about things differently. So that's a very astute point.

Joe Krause [00:07:40]:

The idea, though, of the SWOT and making sure that people think outside of their, right in front of their face is something that's interesting. And sometimes bringing an outside facilitator coming in with industry experience, or even other industry experience sometimes makes those conversations a little bit more robust so that there isn't anything that's missed. So I appreciate you driving that home because it's something I've seen quite often.

Eric Schurr [00:08:01]:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan Morgan [00:08:02]:

Yeah. And really I want to dig a little bit deeper into kind of the difference aspect of strategic foresight, maybe let's just hypothetical situation, let's throw ourselves back just before 2020, maybe fall of 2019, where we're doing our swot analysis. Well, many people probably aren't thinking about a threat being a worldwide pandemic that's going to shut down our entire business. How would strategic foresight differ in a planning process? What would you do differently? And would strategic foresight even pick up on something like a global pandemic in the past, before it's actually happened at this point? Or is it focused on something completely different?

Eric Schurr [00:08:37]:

No, that's. No. Thanks for the question. What foresight does is it allows us to build a broad base by which we would look at the environment around us. I think that's probably the biggest consideration it provides us. So when we talk about steepen or Pestle, these are acronyms that stand for societal, Technological, economic, environmental and legal. Did I miss any? I don't think I did. Those dimensions affect every problem that are out there.

Eric Schurr [00:09:11]:

And the interesting thing about strat plans that I have seen lately is that strategic plans, the durations have grown shorter. It used to be three to five years and then one to three years. And now I'm seeing more organizations, a strategy for the next twelve to 18 months, with the notion that they're going to adopt over time. And the reason is, when you ask them, why don't you extend? Is because what we really don't know, things are changing so rapidly. What foresight does is foresight is. I talked about being a discipline, a good organization, or an organization that performs foresight well, has a culture of exploration and curiosity. So they are looking for outliers, extraneous events, the weird, if you will, just that, the fringe, to see what's going on. I'll give you an example.

Eric Schurr [00:10:02]:

About four years ago, I came across an article, and I thought it was so fascinating because the county of Sandusky, Ohio had by referendum granted Lake Erie legal, represent, legal rights, the right to have legal representation. And the story went on to say, the reason that the vote came up and the reason that the citizens actually approved this legal status for the lake, was because the citizens were really concerned about the environmental quality of the lake, and they saw the lake as dying, and they saw it as being a great resource that they really wanted to preserve and protect. That, to me, is interesting. Not the event itself, but the societal shift. Why did people decide to provide what we consider an inanimate object, legal representational rights. We see that in other aspects. We see that in terms of rights, let's say gay marriage, LGBTQ rights. We have seen rights and responsibilities and openness that happen at societal level that sometimes happen more quickly than individuals can actually morph and move into, you take that societal aspect and now you apply it to any one of those other categories.

Eric Schurr [00:11:13]:

We can talk about technology, and I'm sure we will in a minute. But technology is. It's in the newspapers today. That's all we talk about. It feels like that's all we talk about, is the future of technology. So to pull back for a second, what organizations do if you're sitting in 2019 is you are developing a strategic plan. And if you have been scanning the environment and looking for those fringe things, you will have noticed potentially that we have already had four worldwide pandemics since 2000 in 2019. Now, they didn't spread to the degree that the next one did.

Eric Schurr [00:11:47]:

But if you are writing scenarios and you are putting forth a potential future environment that you are going to be involved in, particularly if you're in healthcare or related industry like that, or even education, to not have a scenario that doesn't at least contemplate the possibility of a pandemic, shame on you, because we've seen them before. So it was kind of a testament to the number of strategic plans that ended up in the trash by the third week of March of 2020, to their unpreparedness around some of what we call black swan events that occurred. We see this all the time, just in lesser degrees, in everyday occurrences. And what a foresight focused organization will do is they will have a culture of curiosity and scanning and putting those observations in some sort of a database so that people can actually reflect and begin to piece things together. Because we're not predicting the future, what we are doing is we are saying, what is the possibility? If we had a pandemic and we had increased tribalization as an example, and we had an economic meltdown, now, that's a pretty dystopian future, but what would happen in that space? And if we can begin to create an environment there and look at that as part of our swot analysis, then we can start to put together what a strategy is for our organization that would allow us to be effective in that operation. Is that our strategy? No. But if you put that exercise against two or three other potential futures and ask yourself, what is the strategy in each of those futures? When you look for the commonalities, you can draw the commonalities that is the basis for a robust future, no matter what environment you're going to encounter. And the beauty of this is now.

Eric Schurr [00:13:45]:

You have optionalities because although you don't know which future is going to unfold as time marches on and you see events start to happen, you can start to pull back and look at your scenarios and say, well, it looks like it's going this way or it's going this way, and you have options because you've thought about them. Now you can go revisit them, but it's not just starting from a clean slate, and you're certainly not starting from a place of, oh, my gosh, what do we do next?

Joe Krause [00:14:07]:

It's interesting you say that, because I think the industry that probably has had the most disruption in the last month would be the traditional real estate market, where you hire a real estate agent. You go to a house, the seller is the, you know, paying a percentage of the sale. Half of it goes to the buyer's agent, the other half goes to the seller's agent. With the big lawsuit recently, that's now out the window, and you have to imagine the big real estate firms were potentially for years knew this was coming. And you could see which ones, even in my own local market in New Jersey, which ones have probably had those types of conversations that you're talking about and ones that didn't, because a lot of them are now changing their business model. Maybe it's a, I charge you to show you a house, maybe I take a flat fee versus a percentage. And you're starting to see some lawyers even saying, I will do pretty much everything for you for this fee, even in the first, like, six weeks of the change. So my question is, how much time and energy do you think organizations realistically have the ability to, like, really, when they put the scenarios together, start to put those contingency plans in place, because ultimately they, it's probably hard enough to run a regular business, but if we're saying this black swan event, even though it's predictable, is coming, how much energy, how many people do you peel off to? Then I maybe think of that new world.

Joe Krause [00:15:21]:

How much time and energy and resources are you giving them to do that while still maintaining the core business before the event happens? How do you, how do you manage both worlds there?

Eric Schurr [00:15:31]:

Yeah. So I've introduced the concept of foresight into two organizations that I've worked for, and there's many ways you can do this. The beauty of foresight is you can scale this to the needs of a department or an organization. And the way I have found success in introducing the concept and the practice of foresight into an organization of anywhere from 50 to 400 people is. I ask my colleagues, my execs, do you have somebody in your organization that is curious, that would like to work on a project with me? And I ask for a specific time commitment, and we'll get into that in a minute. But what I try to do is I try to look at an issue that the organization is facing today that could benefit from the context that foresight can create. When I gather people, I'm looking for diversity of experience, I'm looking for diversity of perspective, and I'm looking for diversity of background. Foresight works when you have great diversity.

Eric Schurr [00:16:30]:

So my first team was, this was in a financial services firm. I had a customer service representative, I had a financial analyst, I had an underwriter, I had a collections person who got on the phone and collected delinquent accounts, and I had a marketer. And the five of them we set out to. First off, I had lunch and learned 2 hours. Let's talk about what foresight is. You're coming for a free lunch. You're gonna learn about foresight. If at the end of this presentation you don't wanna participate, no harm, no foul, we'll go on our way.

Eric Schurr [00:17:00]:

And the folks stuck it out. And we spent 1 hour a week, every other week for three months. And we delved into a problem. They introduced the issue that this organization was facing, which was underwriting with using new data points. We learned about scanning, we talked about how to scan, look at the environment, look, you know, do some research, read things that you're not interested in reading, read some science fiction. The idea here is to just be creative and pull notes in that you find interesting, and just bring them in and load them into a little database that I created and tell us why that's interesting. We did that for four weeks. And from there we solidified our scanning into, and we started to coalesce around trends that we were seeing, trends that we could talk about based on the things that we were seeing with those trends.

Eric Schurr [00:17:55]:

Then we said, all right, let's collide those trends, let's put them at the intersection, let's take these four or five trends and collide them together and ask ourselves, what are the implications from? And we use steep from societal, technological, environmental, economic and political view. And we went through first and second order implications. By the time we got the third order implications, it's basically, it's Armageddon or it's the second coming. But that's good. It's really in that 2nd, 3rd order place where the creativity exists. We took those implications and began to create a couple of different scenarios. We then applied those scenarios to our problem, and we had our team present to the executives as a collective subject matter expert and inform the executives on that particular problem using foresight. And with their recommendation, what this did is it introduced the concepts of foresight into the organization in a small control group.

Eric Schurr [00:18:55]:

These folks who normally don't get to work together, got to work together. The differences in perspectives were viewed, heard, and valued. They came up collectively. They went to their utopian side, they went to their dystopian side. So they learned a little bit about themselves. And for the first time, all of these people presented to the executives, and they presented with confidence because they had spent time in the problem. The executive feedback was, that was really good feedback, and they felt that it definitely improved the decision making that they had. I'll circle back the next.

Eric Schurr [00:19:35]:

We had an all staff meeting, asked these folks to stand up and talk about their experience, said, is there anyone else that would like to participate? Fully half of the workforce raised their hands. I still wasn't convinced that we had won, but we ran through two more cohorts like that with two other business problems, and I knew I wondez when the language of foresight started to appear in my weekly project management meetings, then I knew I had won because we started to utilize the language of foresight within our everyday business practice. I've replicated that in my recent organization, the one I'm at today with similar success. The thing about foresight is you can take and you can use it to drive strategy, you can use it to drive innovation, whether it's internal or external innovation, or you can use it just to drive social change. So if you're a social organization looking to drive social impact, particularly think nonprofits, that's a great place to start.

Jonathan Morgan [00:20:30]:

Yeah, absolutely. Love it, and I'd love to apply this live. While we're talking here, I think you mentioned technology a little bit earlier. We're all in this world where technology is continually evolving. Strategists and leaders are constantly focusing on what's the next best thing that's going to change our organization, that's going to come and disrupt our industry and technology, whether that's AI, machine learning, even for some industries, it's still migrating to cloud technology. I think the fear that comes with that is the dystopian world. AI takes over, people lose their jobs. Well, we don't want to do that.

Jonathan Morgan [00:21:02]:

So let's just focus too much on the utopian aspect, which is either, hey, let's trust our people more. Or, hey, everything is going to work out perfectly, and AI is going to make our employees as efficient as possible. We're going to be able to get more results for our customers and do all this great things. How do you think about it in this type of analysis? Evolving technology, the people balancing technology and the human aspect of it.

Eric Schurr [00:21:27]:

Yeah, the future is all about people. Stop. Dead stop. It is not about technology while we have the ability to develop. So let's step back for a second. What is technology? Let's define that. In my mind, technology is a tool that humans devise to make their life easier. So you go back in history, and I go back two generations ago, tv was technology.

Eric Schurr [00:21:50]:

A generation before that, radio was technology. And you go back far enough in our history, controlled fire was technology to some of our ancestors. So what we're talking about today is no different functionally. The question is, to what utility does it serve? Humans, humanity. And while we can talk about how it makes life more efficient, it makes organizations more effective. It even develops things like personalized offers. When we're talking about technology, such as AI, in my mind, there's really not a human benefit there yet. It's organizationally beneficial, but not necessarily individually beneficial.

Eric Schurr [00:22:29]:

Now, some may argue, yeah, I really do like personalization organizations until they can actually prove real value to their customers, regardless of the efficiency side of it, I think technology struggles to gain a foothold. We saw this a little bit with blockchain. We see it a little bit with AI. It's still an exploratory stages here. But what's fascinating about all of this, too, is when you think about artificial intelligence, while it's come up in the media, definitely in the last two to three years, this is work that began in the fifties and sixties. It just took a long time. So, number one, we shouldn't be surprised that we're here. We shouldn't be surprised at the leaps we're making.

Eric Schurr [00:23:16]:

The question is, how does it benefit us? Because we are talking about. So I'm going to plot the organization for a minute, but we're going to talk about the fact that humanity has the ability to affect its environment, and I mean every living thing on this planet. And the question that we have to ask ourselves is, what is that purpose? When you look out at a prairie, which being in the upper midwest, we have, a few of the prairie is out there, and the purpose of the prairie is sustain life for all the prairie the same way humanity is. We talk about the language we use, talk about our relationship with nature is while we're stewards or we're caretakers, we're preservers. But we're really, we tend to fool ourselves a little bit because life will go on with us or without us. And so when we start talking about the ability for us to take on tools to make our lives easier, we have to think more holistically around that. And that's where, when we think about the human good, what does that mean? And it reminds us that our customers are outside the four walls of the organization. So technology, to me, is not necessarily a place to go for efficiency sake only.

Eric Schurr [00:24:34]:

We need to be thinking about what does it mean for our workers? What does it mean for our customers? What does it mean for the people in our value chain who are affected by this as well? Robert?

Joe Krause [00:24:45]:

Yeah, it makes the most sense because I was just at the supermarket yesterday. I still hate self checkout with a fiery passion. My first job ever was a cashier at a supermarket, and I introduced the self checkout lanes, and they were as bad as they were back in 2000 as they are in 2024. We all know the reasons why they're there. It's not because they make the experience of the consumer better. It's to save money and labor costs. Right. So to your point, when we're thinking about technology and how to employ it, we have to understand, does it actually improve anything for the reason why we're here, which is our customers? The alternative to that would be, I fly pretty much weekly.

Joe Krause [00:25:20]:

I love the fact I get my boarding pass on my phone. I can do pretty much everything on the phone. I don't have to call anybody. I don't have to go to a desk. When I get there, I'm able to simply kind of go right to the gate, and that has improved my life. So what have you seen where people lose sight of that, where it sounds simple when we say it out loud, but in reality, when a lot of technology is rolled out and somebody in a strategic planning session said, this is going to be the next big thing, and then when it's rolled out, the consumers hate it, how do you miss, how do you, like, whiff that bad on not knowing what your customers like or need or want?

Eric Schurr [00:25:51]:

I think it's a result of the simplification reductionist thinking that we employ many times as we go to deploy solutions that we believe are going to help our customers. And you brought up a great example, the grocery store. So you have the self checkout lines. But what does that really mean? I was in a grocery store. It's 75,000 sqft. It is not a small grocery store. And they have over half of their checkouts are self checkouts. I was there at about 830 on a weekday night, and there was one person manning one manual checkout lane up in the front.

Eric Schurr [00:26:31]:

The entire front was deserted. There was no activity, and all the stalkers were in the back. You walked in and it felt like it was a ghost town. What does this mean? Well, it means, number one, you don't have the welcoming that you would get and the vibrancy of conversation going on as checkers are, as employees are talking with customers as they're checking out. Secondly, you have this abandonment which just gives rise to a despair and almost a safety concern. I mean, I walked in there and I said, all right, if it's me and this lady and somebody else is in here with nefarious purposes, it's like, how safe do I feel? And third, it just felt like it was not a place I wanted to be at that point in time. Because my mind, when you go to a grocery store, a grocery store along with a hospital and a school, those are community anchors. I mean, people are always there.

Eric Schurr [00:27:27]:

And it shocked me. It just shocked me. It's funny because in Europe, and I can't recall which grocery chain it is, but they have actually introduced what they call slow checkout lanes. And these slow checkout lanes are, they're manned by employees, but the purpose is to actually have in depth conversations with folks. So the employees actually stop and ask their customers, so how are you today? And if you have any pictures of your grandkids, and they take time to actually talk to folks, they realize that sometimes people go to these stores to just be with people. And so while, yes, we think that we have a core purpose, which is to provide a product or service to our customers, sometimes we need to think beyond that. What is the next circle of impact that we are making in the spot? And then maybe that's another way to think about it, too. Foresight does provide the opportunity, multiple opportunities to think about the impact you're making, not just the product you're delivering.

Eric Schurr [00:28:27]:

So it moves it from transactional to impactful.

Jonathan Morgan [00:28:30]:

Yeah, honestly, I never really thought about it until you were going through that example. But my wife and I, we started going to Trader Joe's for our, our family a couple of years ago. And that's one of the things we love about it, is sometimes a little crazy because there's a ton of people in there, but it feels like there's a community there. The people that are checking you out, they're asking you questions, asking about your day. They actually seem like they enjoy working there. And to your point, it's, they're thinking about the consumer and making my experience better so that ultimately their business will be better on behalf of that.

Eric Schurr [00:29:01]:

And how many times have you actually talked to a fellow consumer, like, they'll pick up something and you. And you're looking at it and you go, man, I've thought about buying this once or twice. And so you ask that person, hey, have you tried this? What do you think of it? It's that communication between consumers that's part of business too. That's part of this community. That is what builds your brand. The fact that you can walk in and you feel welcomed, you feel like you're part of a community. Community is all around us. It is.

Eric Schurr [00:29:28]:

And we are. So as humans, we layer ourselves so deeply into communities, we're not aware of half of them that we actually present ourselves in. But we miss them when they're gone. And that was the one thing that I found in that grocery store that evening, is I felt like this was a place that I had gone to in other locations and felt really supported, that the staff was knowledgeable, a lot of people. There was a place that they actually provide space to gather and eat and have coffee, and they've got meeting rooms. And it was absent that day. Wow, that's very different.

Jonathan Morgan [00:30:01]:

Yeah. Well, Eric, this has been fantastic conversation. I've learned a ton. Before we get to our final question, I just have one quick one for those individuals that are looking to do more foresight in their organizations. How can they get started? Where can they learn more information just to give a little bit of insight for them?

Eric Schurr [00:30:17]:

Sure. So there are a number of international organizations that provide foresight work. The association of Professional Foresight Practitioners. Afpenne is a greatplace, afp.org dot. That's a worldwide organization. You can certainly contact me and I can put you in touch. Because foresight is a broad field of study. There might be areas that you are looking for that are more specific around innovation versus strategy or organizational change or vertical specific, but I would say start with the AFP and then there are consultants out there as well.

Eric Schurr [00:30:52]:

And if you google foresight consultancies, you will find that there are a number of folks that have businesses out there as well.

Jonathan Morgan [00:31:00]:

Fantastic. Well, Eric, final question that we asked all of our guests, if you think about your career in went back when you were first starting your experience and your first gig in strategy, what one piece of advice would you give yourself?

Eric Schurr [00:31:12]:

Oh man, I was talking to somebody last Friday and I said I'm an uncomfortable stranger in my history. I look back at my former self and I say, man, that guy's all right, but man, that guy had some flaws. I would say continue to learn, be a lifelong learner. I love to learn, unlearn and relearn. I love to challenge my thinking. I know I'm wrong in many respects in my thinking and I am looking for people who have thought about different aspects of problems differently that helped me hone my thinking. So I would say that's it.

Jonathan Morgan [00:31:47]:

Great. Perfect way to close, Eric. We appreciate all the insights. Like I said earlier, I learned a ton. I know our listeners learned a ton as well and we look forward to hopefully some future podcasts with you in the future.

Eric Schurr [00:31:58]:

Thank you so much.