Thinking Ahead: Train Your Mind To See The Future

A few weeks ago in this blog, make-believe detective Sherlock Holmes got a shout out for his ability to spot every variable and predict any outcome. Holmes seems psychic to the crooks and his fellow detectives, but we know the truth: he’s got great consulting skills!

Maybe you weren’t born with the gift to see the future, but you can practice thinking ahead and seem prescient to your clients.

Start With Little Things

For mundane stuff (a.k.a. “the daily grind”), we tend to behave in a stimulus-response pattern. If it’s raining when you wake up, you skip your morning Starbucks run to give you more time to drive to the office. But if you give it a little thought, you might realize that the rain might also delay your clients and colleagues, setting back meetings and interfering with your schedule for the whole day. Then you can go about about your day with the right expectations, and you can help shepherd everyone around you through the scheduling turmoil.

Make a conscious effort to analyze the small parts of your day, every day: commutes, lunch breaks, working out, etc., and you will eventually get into the habit of planning ahead for everything, big or small. This simple act will pay huge dividends when dealing with tight deadlines, difficult co-workers and unforeseen events that could otherwise ruin your day (or your project…).

Plus, if you glance at the weather the night before, you can wake up a bit earlier and maybe get that double shot nonfat venti mocha after all.

Look Around The Bend

Your upcoming calendar or schedule of events isn’t an archive, so don’t set ‘em and forget ‘em until their time comes. Instead, keep them alive in your mental cause-and-effect network by routinely scanning things further down the line. As a great mentor once told me: “Don’t be like a teenager who’s just learning to drive, only looking at the car in front you. Think about the traffic patterns and what’s coming up around the bend, out of sight. Anticipate difficulties, delays and even accidents, and you can plan around them.”

Create opportunities and scenarios for which you need to prepare. For example, if you have a critical development meeting on Friday, set a reminder on Wednesday. Even if it isn’t completely necessary, your brain will mull it over in the background, and so will the other attendees. Everyone will show up more prepared.

Psychologists call this “priming:” if you find out the developers are going to be testing their code in two weeks, you’ll be more likely to connect that fact to your Friday meeting and predict that they’ll ask for certain status updates, which you can prepare ahead of time.

Look at the Trees, But Remember the Forest

When everything is planned and scheduled, don’t just focus on accomplishing one task at a time! Constantly go back over your current progress, short term goals and future plans. A regularly refreshed cognizance of the big picture will help you predict the long-term ripples (or tsunamis) of small changes or decisions happening today. Some effects won’t show up until much later, but your job is to predict and prepare.

Don’t forget to communicate your thoughts to your project team. If they listen, the big issues may never happen. If they don’t, you’re likely to be proven right about causes and effects over the long term. You’re either adding immediate value or earning long-term credibility, or both.

Think About Unintended Consequences

Thinking about unintended consequences is “motherhood and apple pie” in the consulting business, but some ramifications may come out of left field. Or from the cheap seats. They aren’t related to your original move-countermove plan, and they can still trip you up in the worst possible way. But, notice that they’re not called “unpredictable consequences.”

It might rain every time you wash your car, but rain isn’t an unintended consequence because (as hard as it is to believe) the two aren’t related. You have to be able to tell the difference between unpredictable events and the unintended (but often predictable) consequences of actions or decisions.

For example, if a company implements a new accounting system that provides a more accurate revenue recognition capability, they may be required to restate earnings for prior periods. An SEC investigation is an unintended consequence, but it’s not unforeseeable. As a consultant, it’s your job to see this and raise the warning flag.

And the more often your predictions come true, the more your clients may believe you really are psychic.

Do not confuse predicting unintended consequences with being Chicken Little or crying wolf. You should be able to provide clear cause-and-effect analyses for what you see coming, and you should not assume that every action could produce dire results under the worst possible conditions. Everyone already knows that.

For most of us, thinking ahead just takes a little training, mental discipline and even some experience (battle scars tend to stay etched in our memories). Eventually your mind will get used to considering the variables and possible outcomes for all situations, and you’ll be a more effective consultant.

You may not solve mysteries like Sherlock Holmes, but your clients may start thinking you’re Nostradamus.