Anticipation: Proactive Responsibility

Of all the varieties of human awareness, this one is the most specifically forward-looking. The term itself brings up a sense of anxious excitement, awaiting what may be coming next. Anticipation is value-neutral: it can as easily apply to looking forward to something overwhelmingly pleasant (like a longed-for vacation), as to dreading something extremely difficult (like an impending disaster). Many times, anticipation contains elements of both: looking forward to an important event while fearing that something might go wrong to spoil it.

Properly undertaken, anticipatory awareness can reduce our fear and dread unpleasant consequences. For those negative experiences that we wish to avoid, Chaos Theory tells us that we can’t control (or even know) every element involved in a change project. However, by using our awareness, we can identify a few major factors that will indicate future trends. In my approach, I call these factors significant measurables. They’re the indicators that tell us the direction in which our purposeful change project is moving.

We use significant measurables all the time, though we’re often unaware of them. For example, when we're driving, the spot where the center line on the road seems to intersect the hood of our car gives us a reference that we use constantly to orient our car within its proper lane. We really only notice this significant measurable when it’s absent, as when we’re on a newly-paved road, or when we're driving a strange car. In these cases, we have to consciously adjust to the unfamiliar visual cues.

This awareness we call anticipation prompts us to choose consciously our significant measurables and deliberately monitor them as we press forward. This allows us to make adjustments to our project before the consequences become critical. This brings up a further consciousness: that change is itself subject to change. There’s no such thing as ‘lasting change’ — that is an oxymoron. We have a technical term for trying to stand still on the back of a surfboard: we call it ‘wipe-out’.

NASA is continually striving to make their unmanned spacecraft work more independently from earth-bound guidance. The distances involved in deep space exploration make reactive time-critical corrections increasingly impractical. They’re building into their spacecraft monitors for significant measurables that trigger immediate on-board responses when the pre-set control ranges are reached. This is nothing more than automated versions of what the awareness of anticipation challenges us to do as we pursue purposeful change. These corrections or meta-changes (that is: changes to changes) allow us to stay aligned with our vision as well as to universal Ideals.

As change leaders, that is: people who wish to take responsibility for the direction their lives and businesses are taking, anticipation relieves us of all excuses. Change needs no longer to be seen as something that happens to us. We come to see that all change is something for which we need to take personal responsibility. We know that we’re not responsible for so-called ‘acts of God’, but we are responsible for paying attention to the signs of the times and making appropriate preparations. We can’t blame any other person or thing for our own lack of preparedness.

We appreciate the usefulness of tools such as a ‘risk analysis’ in helping us to seek preparedness. Such tools invite us to plan for worst-case scenarios. However, focusing on the negative doesn’t give us the forward momentum that we seek. Anticipation — that is, awareness of the significant signs of what's happening around us — enables us to take proactive measures long before a problem is upon us.

Once we’ve decided to step into the pilot's seat of our own lives, it’s disingenuous to look for ‘blame’ if our navigation goes astray. Pilots of a tiny two-seater Cessna 150 aircraft that violated restricted airspace around Washington DC some time ago are a perfect case in point. By taking control of a process (in this case, flight) while disregarding all the awareness necessary to maintain that process in control (that is, navigation), they invited the occurrence of an ‘error cascade’ for which they were ultimately held responsible. (An ‘error cascade’ is a seemingly small mistake that leads to additional failures and inevitably to serious consequences.) We need to appreciate that when we say, ‘I want to change my life’, or ‘I want to change my business’ or even ‘I want to change my world’, we’re also saying, ‘I want to be held accountable’.



Anticipation: Proactive Responsibility - To learn more about this author, visit Les Brown's Website.

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