By Monica E. Oss, Chief Executive Officer, OPEN MINDS

I’m just back from vacation—seven sunny days of snorkeling, diving, and fishing on the ocean. This is my annual time to organize my thoughts about the year that has passed and the year ahead. There is something about the focus you need on the water—and the expansiveness of the ocean horizons—that put your plans in perspective.

During this week, I also have the chance to catch up on my “not health care reading”—usually “mind candy” fiction novels and the past few months of The Economist, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and more. Among the many things I learned was the importance of “prospection” in leadership.

It was a new word for me—and is among the emerging key leadership traits discussed by Seamoon Yoon and Michelle Watt of the World Economic Forum (see The Quality Every Leader Should Have To Succeed In Today’s World Revealed). I was familiar with the other leadership traits—resilience, agility, determination, problem solving, and more—but not “prospection”. The dictionary definition of prospection is “foresight and anticipation; the act of looking forward and providing for future wants”.  For organizational leaders, prospection is the measure of the future-mindedness of a leader—the ability to envision the future possibilities of the organization while preparing for the roadblocks that may happen along the way. This leadership competency, prospection, is key to planning for future financial sustainability.

When I talk with executives about envisioning their ‘future’, the response is not often positive. “Who can really predict the future’ is the usual response. It is true that the global (and national) economy is in a state of “permacrisis” (see Permacrisis) and the exact ‘shape’ of the post-pandemic health and human service landscape is still emerging. But there are key directional trends in the field that are known—integrated care models, payviders, retail health care and consumerism, reimbursement tied to performance, price sensitivity, and the end of the public health emergency, to name a few. And envisioning the opportunities and future market positioning in that emerging landscape is a key leadership competency.

It is important to keep in mind that prospection and being ‘future-minded’ isn’t about the knowing exactly what the future will look like—it is about a planning process that prepares the organization for the possibilities. To quote Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, “You need to plan the way a fire department plans: It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.” Our OPEN MINDS eleven-component framework for sustainability—like the competency of future-mindedness—isn’t about predicting a certain future (see Taking The Hike To Sustainability)—it is about preparing for success in multiple possible futures.

And future-minded leadership is not just about optimistic views of what could happen—though that is part of it. Future-mindedness embraces planning for future scenarios—both the positive scenarios and the ones that are not quite so rosy (For more on scenario-based planning, see How To Develop A Strategic Plan: An OPEN MINDS Executive Seminar On Best Practices In Strategy, Portfolio Management & Scenario-Based Planning and How To Do Scenario Planning & Modify Business Units To Support Strategy). Whatever the future scenarios, the key is to envision both the benefits to customers of the proposed new path—but also the worst-case scenarios that could result. This lessens the “surprise” of the inevitable setbacks that come with pursuing a new direction—and provides the organization and its team with a resilience advantage (see The Future-Minded Organization. How One Mindset Helps Employees Navigate Unpredictable Times).

For planning the future, I like the concept of “pragmatic prospection” (see Pragmatic Prospection: How And Why People Think About The Future). This approach constructs both desired future scenarios and an assessment of the current organizational situation and environmental obstacles that could derail those desired outcomes. Those assessments should include performance on externally-relevant performance measures using (see Metrics Matter – Using Quality Measures And Key Outcomes As Performance Drivers), understanding of unit costs and cost drivers (see Keys To Calculating Unit Costs & Case Rates), analysis of overall product portfolio (see Fail Fast), an assessment of organizational financial strength (see The OPEN MINDS Financial Assessment Tools Suite), a review of readiness for optimized health plan contracting (see The OPEN MINDS Managed Care Competencies Assessment) and success with value-based reimbursement (see The OPEN MINDS Value-Based Reimbursement Assessment). These tools (all of them available at no charge to OPEN MINDS Circle Market Intelligence Service subscribers) prepare executive teams and their organizations for success in any future.

The late Navy Admiral James Stockdale described this power of imagining the worst and planning for the best: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”