For some businesses, it may not be a problem of being unable to embrace the future so much as being unable to abandon the past and even the present. These are your candidates for abandonment. Virtually all business organizations are saddled with one or more commitments, processes, investments, structures or policies that do not serve their interests well. Yet abandoning them is often difficult because they are woven into the psyche of the culture and they have become so fossilized that no one thinks of them as options any more. The difficult truth is that we human beings are not good at abandoning things.
Organizations have their own figurative junk closets.
Letting go of the known in exchange for a commitment to the unknown is not something most human beings do comfortably or well. Even in major disasters such as impending hurricanes or floods, people will cling to their homes. In many cases, police must drive people from their houses in order to save their lives. And organizations, or more precisely, people operating in organizations, have the same attachments to the known. From Planning to Futuring There is a better way to think about the future.