Robert Chia

What prevents organizations from noticing transformations occurring around them? Why do they find themselves easily caught and surprised by a new turn of events? Why must organizations constantly revise their forecasts and change their priorities? Why do they so often lack foresight?

This topic introduces you to the power of foresight and shows you how it can be carefully cultivated by re-educating attention. Foresight is the capacity to be finely tuned in to the undercurrents of events and happenings all around us. It involves developing the ability to see what is unseen or overlooked and seeks meaning and coherence beneath the surface of things. The ability to ‘read’ and ‘interpret’ the changing moods of markets, popular opinions, customers, and employees are vital capabilities that no forward-looking individual or business can afford to ignore.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Show the consequences of a lack of foresight.
• Understand why and how we develop perceptual blindness that restricts our capacity for foresight.
• Develop attentional strategies in your daily managing that help cultivate an awareness of the unseen, the obscure, and the overlooked.

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes

The word entrepreneur is derived from two words, entre, meaning to ‘enter’ or to ‘penetrate in between’, and prendere, meaning to ‘grasp’ or ‘seize hold of’. Therefore, an entrepreneur is one who penetrates the spaces between established boundaries and seizes opportunities that are overlooked by others. It is precisely this ability to challenge the dominant worldview and ‘think the unthinkable’ that gives those with an entrepreneurial imagination a decisive advantage over those who pursue strategies based on conventionally held ideas and beliefs.

This topic provides you with some thought strategies to stimulate your entrepreneurial imagination and invites you to shift the focus of your attention to creating added value for your organization.

The objectives for today’s session are to:

• Understand how the entrepreneurial imagination is created through shifting paradigms or worldviews.
• Develop paradigm-shifting strategies to innovate new value-adding products/services/practices within your organization.