Long Term Envisioning

What do people mean when they do:

Long Term Planning

I don't know what that means.

The following are my guesses as to what "Long Term Planning" really means:

1. An exercise in stating some future desired state with no idea how to get there.
2. An explicit agreement that you will diverge from reality at some near point in the future.
3. An exercise in exploring organizational identity.

For conversation types #1 and #2, see the "Planning is guessing" chapter in Rework (p 19). OK, that takes care of 80% of the Long Term Planning situations.

I think that conversation type #3 is a very important conversation that typically gets way too little time. Devoting time to a pragmatic answer to "Why does this organization exist?" can produce a shared vision that can make everyone's work much more coordinated. See the last paragraph on page 58 of "A simpler way" (and subsequent paragraphs) for an inspiring discussion of this topic. You can search for "58" inside this book on Amazon as of Aug. 2010 and read a couple pages.

Each person's individuality can stop going in n directions and start converging on producing real stuff that satisfies the "Why?" question. If it's worthwhile to answer "Why?" with real stuff delivered to the real world, then it continues to be worthwhile to be associated with an organization.

If it becomes impossible to reasonably answer "Why?" or becomes impossible to actually deliver real answers to that question to real people, that is the departure point at which you have to start looking for some other organizational affiliation.

For me, the answer to "Why?" for FamilySearch software development is contained in Doctrine and Covenants 128:24 and continues to be a rich source of inspiration for interesting and valuable software contribution.

Vote with your money

There are prediction markets that people have set up. But those feel like a gimmick to me.

I want a place where I can say:

If you can provide a product that meets the following specifications, at the following price, I obligate myself to buy that product at that price.

I want to be able to state conditions like:

• all software in this product conforms to an OSDL-approved license
• the model of car you build has received at least 3/5 rating by Consumer Reports in such-and-such a category
  
• this cell phone comes with a data-only plan
• the out-of-print book that you publish must be hardback
• the eBook reader you create must be able to display scaled PDFs that can be zoomed and panned
  

I want to be able to have a publicly-viewable, prioritized wish list. I want to put things on my wish list that do not yet exist, but that would be very useful to me. I want to be able to say "Me too" to an item on my friend's list and place it on my list at the appropriate priority. And I want to be able to set an annual spending cap, beyond which I am not obligated to purchase anything further.

And I want vendors to be able to query this site for what kind of demand there is for certain kinds of products. And I want vendors to be able to say: "OK, you said you'd buy it, I'm producing it, and if I give it to you in 6 months, you're committed to buy it." The user who posted his/her desired product can specify how much lead time would be acceptable. For instance, I could say: "I don't want you to require any more than 3 months production time for this item."

And it is a binding contract at that point, as long as the item ends up meeting the stated criteria when it is delivered. After the production process starts, a purchaser would be prevented from re-prioritizing or otherwise adjusting his list in such a way that pushes that item below the "obligitory purchase" spending cap line. And if a user defaults on the contract, then the details are publicly visible; likewise for a vendor.

My intent is to have a system that can create REAL demand for useful, not-yet-existing products without having a bunch of focus groups giving stupid requirements to business execs who work up some product that pins its users into a corner in one way or another.