Strategic Foresight
Strategic foresight is the discipline of seeing change early and acting on it: your leadership team learns to notice what is forming at the edges of its market, to write the futures it could produce, and to place the bets that make the one it intends.
The discipline
A leadership team builds the capacity to notice change at the edges of its market, to imagine and write the futures that change could produce, to test its strategy against each of them, and to place the bets that make the future it intends.
The capacity pays. In a study of 70 large European companies, the firms judged future-prepared in 2008 were, by 2015, 33 percent more profitable than the average, and the listed ones among them grew their market value by 75 percent against an average of 25 percent.
René Rohrbeck and Menes Etingue Kum, “Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 129 (2018): 105–116.
When teams come to Fugue
Answered with horizon scanning and the Sensing Gap Diagnostic
People close to customers and the market see change first, and what they see has no shared place to meet and no path to the room where capital is committed.
Answered with scenario planning
The plan is funded against the market as it was when the plan was written, and the market has started to offer others.
Answered with indicators, thresholds and owners
The shift was discussed in reviews for a year, and no commitment moved, because nobody had agreed what would trigger a change or who could make it.
Scores how the organization observes, interprets, maps its assumptions, imagines futures, formulates strategy, experiments and learns. For an executive team; run on ForesightOps.
Take the diagnosticWhere attention at the edges is thin, where signals have no shared place to meet, and whether the organization tests its futures or only forecasts them.
How the work runs
01
Your people closest to customers and the market see change first. Horizon scanning and weak signal detection give what they see a shared place to meet and a path to the room where capital is committed.
02
Signal synthesis separates the differences that matter from noise and connects what different functions are seeing. A signal earns its place when the team can name the decision it bears on.
03
The team names the few assumptions its plan rests on that would change the strategy if they proved wrong, and puts each against the evidence before money is spent.
04
The team writes two to four scenarios its market could produce, each specific enough to argue from, including the ones it would rather not face. The strategy and its largest commitments are run through each one, and the team sees which bets work in every future and which depend on one.
05
The team commits to the robust bets now and keeps the fragile ones as options it can expand or drop. Each early-warning indicator has an owner and a threshold, and the team agrees in advance who decides and what changes when an indicator crosses it: expand a bet, pause it or stop it. The scenarios are revisited on a set rhythm, so the strategy changes when the evidence does.
Strategic Foresight workshop
Workshop, one day
Test your plan and your largest commitments against several plausible futures, and see which commitments work across them before you commit more.
What the organization keeps
The team keeps the registry and the rhythm for keeping it, the scenarios it wrote, the bets marked robust or fragile, the early-warning indicators with the owners who watch them, and the decision rules that say who may expand, pause or stop a bet when an indicator crosses its threshold. Strategic foresight becomes a capability the organization runs, with the methods published on ForesightOps.
Who decides when the evidence changes: Organization DesignRequest a briefing
Tell us in a 30-minute briefing, and we'll help you decide where to start.
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