Some management teams believe that you have to measure where you are before you take a step forward. “We can’t afford to waste energy, time, resources, money, or make a mistake,” they tell us. “One step at a time (incremental gains) is how progress should be made.”

Other leadership teams spend their time first creating a detailed and feasible picture of the future. “Let me show you what customers want and how we can be the best at delivering that,” they energetically declare. Once they show the future design to their teams, the conversation and everyone’s attention turn to building it—and making it real.

Both ways can be right—depending on your leaders’ and their followers’ preferences and the time you work and live in.

It’s my opinion than when the status quo rules, a measured approach forward yields more predictably successful outcomes. However, in uncertain and quickly changing times (Paris bombings, hello iWatch, driverless cars, bitcoin, ISIS, gas under $2/gallon), a futures-based approach rooted in design thinking is preferred. When customers’ preferences, technology, geopolitics, and the competition are all changing, driving forward by looking in the rear view mirror just doesn’t work. In fact, its dangerous.

If you don’t believe me, try it sometime. (Disclaimer: I am kidding. Always look through the windshield of your car when driving forward 😉

That metaphorical rear view mirror is real. It’s called ROI (return on investment). Most ROI models I’ve worked with try to recreate past successes by turning what made the business do well yesterday into a best practice for now. ROI models are based on (often invisible and dangerous) assumptions:

• The world is going to be the same tomorrow (next week, next quarter, , next year, etc.) as it is today
• If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter
• ROI is good for most decisions (even though it was introduced as a technique to evaluate one-time capital investments)
• Small changes that move the needle are better than bigger ones that only might move it

In times of intense change, customers’ preferences and needs change rapidly. To keep an organization in sync with its customers, leaders have to dedicate their attention to the creation of value for them—not the extraction of value from them.

The organizational focus needs to be on creating new capabilities that let the organization deliver more value to customers (while, of course, retaining profits for shareholders). This kind of ‘new’ activity just doesn’t fit the ROI model.

When it comes to CX initiatives, one of the biggest challenges around ROI is that it favors keeping things the same. CX initiatives, by their design- and customer-friendly nature is to introduce change. Thinking cynically for a moment, maybe ROI doesn’t mean ‘return on what you invest’ rather it favors ‘return on what’s already been invested’.

Think about this…

Do you think we need activities designed to fit the ROI or a new ROI designed to fit the new activities?

This post is part of a series of 15 questions to get you started thinking about what matters most–to your customers and to your bottom line. For all the questions at once, please download http://www.slideshare.net/mikewittenstein/15-business-questions-you-need-to-ask-yourself-in-2015.