Dancing with the Future

Dancing with the Future is the origin story of Strategic Navigation — a methodology for strategic management and future-proofing in real-time that has been deployed on every inhabited continent over three decades. It begins in 1993, when Richard Hames and Marvin Oka declined a conventional consulting brief from the Australian Taxation Office and proposed something else entirely: a sustained, open-ended engagement that would challenge the organisation's most fundamental assumptions about purpose, strategy, and what it means to navigate conditions no plan can fully anticipate.

Drawing on Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model, Clare Graves's developmental frameworks, David Kolb's learning cycle, and the thinking of Richard Slaughter and Richard Bawden — and forging something original from all of them — Hames and Oka built a methodology in live conditions, tested against one of the most significant transformations in Australian public administration: the introduction of the GST and the reform of the entire business tax system. The result was a strategic intelligence architecture still active in the ATO's culture decades later and credited by senior figures with contributing to eight successive federal budget surpluses.

The book follows Strategic Navigation from its origins in an executive retreat at Gold Creek through its international deployment, including a candid account of what succeeded and what didn't when the methodology met different soil in post-apartheid South Africa. It closes with a practitioner's Memory Jogger: nine sets of diagnostic questions covering the full scope of the methodology, from contextual sensing and strategic foresight to Systemic Acupuncture and the seven functions of the Change Brain.

This is a book about what genuine strategic intelligence requires — and what it can produce when the right people bring themselves fully to a shared endeavour.