During the 3 years I was a manager at IBM, our uber-manager sent her management team a book on leadership. I never read this tome of a read, instead opting to read a passage at a time when I had a few minutes to spare.

One passage I always seem to come back to is about exploring your past. A study was done by Omar El Sawy (USC) on 34 CEOs, split into 2 groups. Both groups were asked to look into their future, and list/date out ten events they think might (or will) happen. Both groups were also asked to look into their past, and list/date events that have happened in their past.

The differences in the two groups was order -- one group listed out their future first, the other their past first.

Both groups had similar past horizons -- averaging around 20 years. But the future horizons were interesting. On average the CEOs that reflected first had future horizons of nearly double (3.2 vs. 1.8 years), with maximums of 9.2 vs. 5.1 years.

El Sowy believes his research supports the "one-way-mirror hypothesis", saying, "We make sense of our world retrospectively, and all our understanding originates in reflection and looking backward.... e construct the future by some kind of extrapolation, in which the past is prologue, and the approach to the future is backward-looking."

The holidays are a time for reflection, and a time for prognosticating -- the famous New Year's resolutions. This year I think I'll do a little more reflecting first, in hopes of elongating my future!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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PS- The book is called "The Leadership Challenge" by James Kouzes and Barry Posner