A Lasting Legacy of Foresight
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Jan 21, 2010
Yesterday I was in Ohio for the first time in ten years. I drove past the 48 acres I grew up on along the Ohio Turnpike. I remember when I was five, my parents took me out for a walk along the edge of our property by the turnpike, and we planted saplings of pine trees. I didn't dig, but I did place some of the trees into the ground and covered the roots with sod. Yesterday I was shocked and delighted to see that those same pine trees now tower over the turnpike, far taller than any surrounding trees, providing the lucky current owners of the old homestead some visual and aural separation from traffic on the turnpike. Those trees are a lasting legacy of foresight.
I'm an eighth-generation Ohioan, and the road I grew up on was named after my ancestors, who settled that corner of Ohio in 1802, searching for a better life for their family. My ancestors blazed a trail through the wilderness, and their descendents have lived in that area for 208 years. That road is a lasting legacy of foresight.
The reason I was traveling was to celebrate the life of my uncle: among the things we celebrated was his religious conversion while he was dating his fiancée 50 years ago, so that he could raise his children in his wife's faith. Extending now to the faith of his grandkids, that too is a lasting legacy of foresight.
In market research, all too often, we are focused on the here and now and the next week. Project after project, survey after survey, presentation after presentation. It is easy to be so heads down that we forget to look up at the big picture of what we are working on. We are often relegated to the tactical, serving the transient needs of other departments and of senior management. Yet we are passionate about the research that we do, and eager to make a strategic difference.
We need to be proactive about how we can help our organizations learn and better understand our "customers": whether they are paying clients, business partners, fellow employees or citizens. We have extensive knowledge of our customers as they are today, and if we look closely, we have the insight into how our customers are changing, and what that means for us, good and bad. As researchers, we need to look for opportunities to identify the macrotrends that have the potential to drive growth and opportunity for our organization for years if not decades to come.
Dare I say it, we need to see the forest not the trees, to see the towering pine where the sapling is today and to find a way to turn our hard work for our organization into a lasting legacy of foresight.