Five Key Questions for Thinking Beyond the Status Quo

Five questions will get you started on the thinking journey beyond the conventional, beyond the present.

Thinking beyond the status quo is thinking about futures. The status quo is known and the rules of its game are understood and shared. Our brains prefer the status quo because the patterns it uses to help you make sense of the world are clear, and humans prefer the status quo because it provides certainty.

Yet the status quo isn’t much fun anymore – a continuous stream of emails, phone calls, meetings and crises at work, and today’s way of dealing with social change aren’t terribly effective anymore. Thinking beyond the status quo means admitting there are no right answers, and that strategic uncertainty is a fact of life. We know we need to think differently about how we do things today to be able to deal proactively to the changing environment in which organisations exist, to know what’s important and what’s not, and to craft strategy in response to that change rather than finding out too late that the only option is to react.

These five questions will get you started on the thinking …