“Skate to where the puck is going,” Wayne Gretzky’s father taught him. That is, don’t skate to where the puck is, but to where the puck is going to be. Anticipate the direction and speed of the puck and get there first. Jump ahead of the competition by learning to see the trajectory of the puck and predict where you need to be for optimal results. This often shared bit of leadership wisdom from the one who is widely considered the GOAT (greatest of all time) of hockey has been considered the key to success in both hockey and, well, everything else too, right? (Gretzky retired with sixty-one records, nine MVP trophies, and four Stanley Cup trophies.) This little saying has been repeated by Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett about business, and by countless others about leadership and politics.
The Challenge of Predicting the Future
Gretzky played in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when there were certainly challenges facing leaders in every field. But without question, the speed of change and the disruption of the first two decades of the twenty-first century could not even be imagined back then. After two decades of technological acceleration, globalization, health crises, geopolitical turmoil, racial turmoil, and deep cultural division, most leaders would admit that trying to skate to where the puck is going is pretty impossible if the game now seems to have fourteen pucks going in fourteen different directions. How do you lead when you cannot understand the present moment, let alone predict the future?1
Embrace Prototyping Instead of Predicting
Our answer: Don’t predict. Prototype.
Don’t try to figure out the future, instead learn from small experiments how to take one new step into a new world.
A bias to action is a tendency to default to repeating the same past actions. But bias for action should be a bias for reflective action—that is, action based on what we are seeing and learning, including what we are eager to learn that we don’t yet know.
The Power of Prototypes in Leadership
For organizations that thrive in a changing world, a bias to action is about a bias to new, thoughtful actions that come from experimental activities. The leaders have a healthy and vibrant curiosity, restlessness, and eagerness to learn. This kind of bias to action is built on the belief that most decisions are reversible, that experimenting with new ideas, new product lines, and new services tends to lead to new insights that enable an organization to see more clearly in the fog of change. This mindset includes a much deeper tolerance for failure. As the oft-repeated mantra of Silicon Valley goes, “fail fast, learn fast” (to which a Silicon Valley venture capital investor once added in a meeting I was running, “And fail cheap. It’s my money.”).
Key Questions Prototypes Can Address
These safe, modest, cheap experiments are called prototypes. They are low-quality, simple ways of testing a concept, an idea, or a potential larger program. And at the heart of a prototype is a question.2 Prototypes help us explore the critical questions that we have developed in the previous step. They allow us to challenge our default behaviors and mental models. They help us identify the ideas and assumptions that we have had in the past and allow us to explore them more deeply. Some of the questions that our clients have explored with prototypes are these:
➜ What spiritual practices can we teach an entire congregation to do without launching a new program?
➜ Do we have to be “cool” to attract young people to church?
➜ How might we engage our neighbors in making our neighborhoods better places to live?
➜ What are the ways that we can use technology to deepen a sense of community?
Discovering Insights Through Prototypes
Prototypes guide our learning and help us discover what we couldn’t see before
Taken from How Not to Waste a Crisis by Tod Bolsinger. ©2024 by Tod Bolsinger. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Taken from How Not to Waste a Crisis by Tod Bolsinger (from the Practicing Change Series)
Taken from Chapter 6, “Don’t Predict. Prototype”
