This is the second installment of our series on cross-impact analyses, an important analytical tool in the foresight toolkit. In the first installment we examined the origins and legacy of Trend Cross-Impact Analysis as it has been practiced at FSG.
In the late 1940s Hollywood studios were a cultural and economic colossus. Compared to them television was a toy. Television had been around nearly twenty years but regular broadcasting—if you could call it that—did not even begin until 1939. Interesting but nothing to do with the big-time.
So why in 1948 (the year the abbreviation “TV” was coined) were Hollywood box office receipts down 45 percent from what they were five years before? The answer is that in 1941 there were 10,000 televisions in the United States. Ten years later there were twelve million.
Television was more than a disruption. It changed everything. And Hollywood couldn’t do anything about it.
The intrusion of television into Hollywood’s operating environment is an example of a cross impact. A cross impact is a phenomenon—a technology, a social trend, a clause in a piece of legislation—that appears unrelated to one’s core business but evolves to become an irresistible force that one cannot control.
Spend two minutes thinking about any important industry. Notice how often the participants were upended by a phenomenon they did not see coming, leaving them unprepared for something they never spent much time thinking about.
Thirty years ago, for example, the arrival of the Internet as a consumer phenomenon provoked newspaper companies to think about its meaning for their business. Newspapers and the Internet were about words and pictures; the parallel was obvious. By comparison, terrestrial radio was slower to react. The consequences are still felt.
(In the case of AM radio a second cross impact is now in play: the digitalization of automobiles. Car manufacturers complain that amplitude-modulated signals interfere with a car’s electronics.)
With a rigorous imagination and strategic discipline organizations can develop the habit of scanning the horizon for cross impacts and take action. A good example is the Girl Scouts of the USA.
Sensing Change in the Air
In the 1970s Girl Scouts USA was in danger of looking old-fashioned to young girls growing up in a country where second-wave feminism was having profound cultural impacts. As established organizations tend to do in such situations, Girl Scouts responded by leaning into what worked in the past. The past, as one Girl Scout executive put it, was “the Betty Crocker era,” when the emphasis was cultivating traditional homemaking skills.
When Frances Hesselbein was recruited as executive director of the Girl Scouts in 1976 she saw how social change was breaking like a wave across the country and, inevitably, across the Girl Scouts, whose very mission was transmission of traditional values. She led the creation of new activities—and badges—in science and technology. She reoriented the organization to the creation of a diverse membership base. The effect of this redirection on a moribund organization was immediate.
This did not mean rejection of the organization’s core identity. Girl Scouts USA embedded the “Girl Scout Leadership Experience” which emphasizes “making the world a better place”—something Girl Scouts have always done. The difference is a 21st Century emphasis on leadership experience in areas like entrepreneurship and STEM.
For good and ill, cross impacts ripple through an organization. In its strategic plan for 2024-28, for example, Girls Scouts of San Diego defined their strategic vision as “to be viewed and valued as the go-to partner for developing and elevating girl and women leaders in San Diego and Imperial counties.”
Such language is a long way from the “Betty Crocker Era. It is a logical evolution of GSA’s core mission.
In the present era GSA faces new challenges from the external environment, just as their counterparts at Scouting America do. Frances Hesselbein’s experience may offer a useful example of getting out in front of change.
Lessons from Cross-Impact Analysis
Leaders with a reflex for understanding cross impacts can work major changes in an organization’s strategic direction. The test is whether the organization can make that reflex endure—to, in effect, institutionalize it by investing the time and talent to examine external factors that might upend current successes.
Successful organizations are frequently bad at this, which should not be surprising. An organization’s very success often blinds it to powerful but subtle changes building in the world around them. Understanding the implications of cross impacts requires cultivation of strategic imagination.
Like a dinosaur looking up at an oncoming asteroid we need to think ahead about the meaning of the asteroid’s impact. But first we need to notice the asteroid.
Great essay. It suggests a thought experiment about what cross-impacts the GSA should be contemplating in 2025 to ensure their continued success in 2035 and beyond.
What would Frances Hesselbein say?
I don’t know what Frances Hesselbein would say, obviously. Her reflex for spotting new cross impacts would be a good starting place.
In 2025 that might include any number of things. American kids are notoriously unhappy right now, for example, and the reasons are said to be multiple. Over-stretched parents, the decline of community activities like kids’ sports, the ubiquity of soul-destroying social media, the hunger for something nourishing to believe in. The Girl Scouts’ core values speak to all of those. Addressing them head on might present a growth opportunity for GSA.
The mistake to avoid, of course, is to avoid the impulse to say “this time will be like last time.” History might seem to repeat itself, but seldom literally.
Great piece. Right now, there seems to be one issue overriding all others, in every part of the mediasphere and all the thinking of organizations and institutions. One wonders what cross-impacts are being overshadowed – and overlooked – as a result.