Research 01
Doctoral research
Doctoral research at the University of Johannesburg, supervised by Professor Tshilidzi Marwala: what do organisations do to succeed in the future?
Research
Research
The data, the methods and the maths are all published here.
Everything Craig presents, whether on stage, in a workshop or on this site, comes from his own research. This page sets out where that research comes from, how it was done and where the original research is, including any contrary findings.
Checkable
Most trend experts present predictions that cannot be checked. Craig’s work is built to be checked.
Research
programme
Everything Craig presents comes from one research programme, and each part of it is published here.
Research 02
The Future Fitness Score
25 attributes in three categories (leadership, organisation and landscape), built into WhatTheForesight.
Research 03
The Boat Lock model
five necessary gates, from 759 leaders in 157 organisations over four years.
Research 04
The factorial threshold
where combined change overtakes doubling.
Research 05
Women-led businesses
Research on women-led businesses, presented at the Babson Diana conference.
Read the paperResearch 06
Four Future Seasons
Four Future Seasons, Penguin Random House.
The dataset
Four years, four countries
759leaders
157organisations
21sectors
50,000+datapoints
Over four years, WhatTheForesight collected responses from 759 leaders in 157 organisations across 21 sectors in South Africa, India, Thailand and Qatar, producing more than 50,000 datapoints. The organisations range across professional services, banking and insurance, hospitality, technology, education and the public sector. The Future Fitness Score and the Boat Lock model both come from this one dataset.
Research
The Future Fitness Score
Craig’s PhD at the University of Johannesburg, supervised by Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, then Vice-Chancellor and now Rector of the United Nations University, set out to answer one question: what do organisations do to succeed in the future? Over four and a half years of mixed-method research, it identified 25 attributes, grouped into leadership, organisation and landscape.
The Future Fitness Score turns those 25 attributes into a single number. A board already tracks its financial health with numbers, and this lets it track how prepared it is for the future in a similar way.
The Boat Lock model
Five necessary gates
1Right team
2Investment discipline
3Agility
4Operations
5Governance
Research
The Boat Lock model
Most research on company performance looks at what successful companies have in common. The Boat Lock model asks a different question of the same data: what can a company not succeed without?
Picture a boat in a canal lock. It cannot rise until the gates are open, and once they are, the water lifts it. The research found five capabilities that work like those gates: the right team, investment discipline, agility, operations and governance. If any one of them is below a minimum level, there are no high performers in the data at all, however strong the company is elsewhere. A brilliant team cannot make up for poor investment discipline.
Leadership, vision and culture work differently. Top performers score well on them, so they look essential, but plenty of companies reach high performance without them. Technology is the clearest example. Leaders named it their most urgent priority by a wide margin, yet it sits near the bottom of the list for profit, and only pays off in companies that already have investment discipline in place.
There is also no single route to the top. High performers have their gates open in different combinations, which is why copying a competitor’s strategy so often fails.
From the model Craig built the Foresight Typology, which places a company in one of six types. The most common, at 39 per cent of the 56 organisations with enough responses to classify, is the Overclaimer: a company that believes it is world class and spends on vision, culture and technology while one of its gates is still shut.
The gates were found using Necessary Condition Analysis, the winning combinations using fuzzy-set configurational analysis, and three separate checks were run to control for respondents who rate everything highly. Two limits are stated openly. All the data is what leaders believe about their own organisation, and linking it to audited financial results is the next stage. The popular idea that performance follows a fixed sequence of steps was also tested, and the data did not support it. The keynote
The factorial threshold
3.46
Most business planning assumes exponential change: one force, such as technology, growing over time. That is fast, but a company can keep up by planning harder with necessary investments (even though these may not be correctly deployed). Today several forces change at once, for example geopolitics, technology and climate, and when they combine the change behaves more like a factorial, which grows far faster.
Craig’s calculation shows where the switch happens. Doubling runs 2, 4, 8, 16. Factorial growth runs 1, 2, 6, 24. Factorial overtakes doubling at 3.46 changes, which is four in practice, since there is no such thing as part of a change. At three changes doubling is still ahead, 8 to 6. At four, factorial leads 24 to 16. By six it is 720 to 64.
Read it yourself
Published and forthcoming
The Performance Lock: A Necessity-Sufficiency Model of Organisational Performance
The academic paper behind the Boat Lock model, being prepared for peer review.
Download the PDFOpen the Right Gate
The shorter version of the same research, written for business leaders.
Download the PDFFor anyone who wants to check the maths
The factorial curve is above the doubling curve wherever ½ln(2πn) + n(ln n − 1 − ln 2) is greater than zero, which solves at n = 3.46 using the Gamma function and at n = 3.49 using Stirling’s approximation. The figures of 4.28 and 4.128 in some of Craig’s older material were wrong and have been withdrawn.
Preparation
hardens decisions.
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