Connecting leader_envision the future
Leadership development

The connecting leader: Envision the future; deliver today

Leaders today must anticipate and shape the future while simultaneously delivering results and operating with great efficiency. This article offers advice on how companies can help leaders build the capabilities they need.

This is one in a series of articles on how executives can develop the capabilities to become connecting leaders. To learn more, see “The connecting leader.”

By Regis Chasse, Steven Krupp, Jarrad Roeder, and David Seijas

In a world where more is expected of corporations and leaders than ever before, where more is uncertain and harder to understand, envisioning the future is a high-stakes, daunting task. Forward looking leaders succeed when they embrace uncertainty, imagine future scenarios, reshape their mindset to navigate the unknown and, at the same time relentlessly simplify their focus on the critical few priorities that differentiate and sustain competitive advantage. 

The leaders of Alphabet—Google’s parent company—made a strategic decision that represents this challenge when they split Google from the innovative, future shaping, and breakthrough businesses that also sit under the Alphabet parent company, including Waymo (self-driving cars), Nest (home automation), and DeepMind (AI). Alphabet’s leaders understood they had to focus most of the organization on best-in-class execution of the search engine business to stay ahead of challengers, without taking their eyes off the future. 

Likewise, Andrés Gluski, president and chief executive officer of AES, a global energy company, announced a bold commitment to a forward-looking renewable energy vision without compromising on short-term objectives: “Through 2027, we expect to significantly increase the capacity of solar, wind, and energy storage to our portfolio, while simultaneously delivering annual rate base growth of 10% at our US Utilities.”1 Many have questioned this aggressive position, which includes AES’s intention to close nearly all its coal plants by 2025, yet AES remains focused on leading responsible transitions, mitigating impacts of climate change, and improving lives.

Developing the capabilities needed to envision the future while delivering today

Our research and work highlight the following five key characteristics that help leaders to envision the future while delivering today: 

  1. Strategic and forward-looking. Leaders should envision and plan for multiple futures, develop flexible strategies, and make choices to profit from uncertainty and turbulence in the market.
  2. Transformational. Leaders should think about and build for exponential growth and anticipate the impact of change on employees and customers, while remaining laser focused on organizational purpose.
  3. Decisive and data focused. Leaders should ensure a foundation of financial excellence, business acumen, and real time analytics to support making decisions and tradeoffs at pace. 
  4. Simplicity focused. Leaders should distinguish between necessary and needless complexity and become ruthless about reducing or even eliminating organizational clutter.
  5. Digital and AI savvy. Leaders should become digitally attuned enough to ask the right questions, stay ahead of emerging technologies such as AI, and adapt (personally and organizationally) at the speed of digital transformation.

Leaders must combine these characteristics to succeed at anticipating an uncertain future while simultaneously delivering results in a volatile present. Based both on proprietary and external research, we know this skill set is rare. We also know it’s critical, as our assessments of leaders for the past ten years show that two of the most frequent derailers for leaders are “taking on too much and overcommitting” and “setting too many strategic priorities that overwhelm and confuse.”2 This indicates that many leaders lack prioritization and clear focus, which in turn puts enormous stress on the organization and on people.

Peter Attfield, former chief talent and learning officer at Jardine Matheson, articulates the envision and deliver dual track well: “One of the conversations we’ve been starting to have is around ambidextrous leadership, to give it a name. [Meaning,] not only do you need the core to perform, but you need to transform the future as well at the same time. I saw recently, from a fairly large data set of senior leaders around the world, that they said that about 12% of senior leaders have this ambidextrous capability—that’s a really low number.”3

To equip leaders to be more ambidextrous in attending to and balancing future vision and current demands, we point leaders we work with to a few practical skills and tips: 

  • Develop scenario plans for a 36-month horizon. Project possible futures, explore the implications for each one of them, and prioritize the key success factors that can be addressed immediately for both short and long-term impact across multiple scenarios. Anticipate unintended consequences of short-term decisions on future scenarios and changing customer expectations, then execute at pace. 
  • Accelerate transformational change. Challenge assumptions, mindsets, and habits that are slowing down exponential change and rally teams around the common vision. 
  • Simplify and focus. Identify the critical priorities to relentlessly focus on given changing customer and business expectations and assess how to best streamline activities and optimize resources to deliver against them. 
  • Embrace AI and digital technologies. In addition to finding the right ways to implement AI in your own organization,4 ensure you and your organization keep learning about how AI will impact your business or function to get ahead of the change curve.

Conclusion

In a world that is changing at an accelerating pace, where shareholders scrutinize short-term performance and customers expect immediate value, the ability to envision the future while delivering on immediate objectives will become the norm. Winning in the marketplace will rely on the leaders’ ability to anticipate emerging trends before their competitors and build their organizations to navigate multiple possible futures. 

About the authors

Dr. Regis Chasse (rchasse@heidrick.com) is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ Washington, DC, office and a member of Heidrick Consulting.

Steven Krupp (skrupp@heidrick.com) is a partner in the Philadelphia office and a member of Heidrick Consulting and the CEO & Board of Directors and Healthcare & Life Sciences practices.

Jarrad Roeder (jroeder@heidrick.com) is a principal in Heidrick & Struggles’ Philadelphia office and a member of Heidrick Consulting.

David Seijas (dseijas@heidrick.com) is an engagement leader in Heidrick & Struggles’ New York office.

References

1 Will Norman, “AES to triple renewables capacity by 2027 and ditch coal by 2025,” PVTech, May 9, 2023. 

2 Proprietary Heidrick & Struggles’ analysis. 

3 Grace Gu and David Hui, “Developing forward-looking leaders: An interview with Peter Attfield, former chief talent and learning officer at Jardine Matheson,” Heidrick & Struggles.

4 Ryan Bulkoski, Adam Howe, “Structuring the AI function: The right questions to find the right model,” Heidrick & Struggles, November 14, 2024.