Horizon Foresight

What is Foresight?

For a primer on the basics of Strategic Foresight (or just Foresight), check out our quick introductory post here. But the TL;DR is this: Strategic Foresight is a simple, clear, repeatable process for helping your team prepare for a rapidly changing future. Foresight consists of three basic steps: SCANNING the horizon for trends that matter to you, INTERPRETING those trends with engaging stories about the future, and PLANNING for that future by identifying key milestones and actions. The goal is to become future-ready, an organization that is agile, flexible, and prepared for whatever the future brings.

Why Foresight?

Foresight is critical in today’s world because there are literally infinite places to invest your precious, limited resources. Besides time and money, appetite for change is probably the scarcest resource of all. But we must change, constantly, both in response to outside stimuli as well as proactively.

We all want to innovate, to do new things and to do old things better. But we owe it to ourselves and our teams to innovate thoughtfully, and to do that we need a process to help analyze and prioritize change. Innovating without foresight basically means we hope we’re right about the changes we are asking our people to make. And even if you are right, change without a process is always an uphill battle. Change without foresight is like climbing Everest without a Sherpa. It’s a bad idea at best, and a fatal mistake at worst.

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it’s about being prepared for it. The process of scanning, interpreting, and planning gives everyone confidence that we are focusing our change in the right areas. Foresight also makes it easier to seize opportunities and react to disruptions, because it strengthens and stretches our “flexibility muscles.” Foresight makes us better prepared for the future we want as well as the ones we’re trying to avoid.

Example: Disease X

Being future-ready can save not just time and money, but also lives. In 2017 the World Economic Forum implemented a foresight-driven initiative called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). CEPI was created with a single, future-ready mission: fund “plug‑and‑play” vaccine platforms before a crisis hits. Just a year later the World Health Organization added the CEPI’s hypothetical “Disease X” to its R&D priority list, turning the unknown itself into a target for global preparedness.

That early groundwork paid off in a big way when COVID-19 emerged the next year. Moderna, the company that launched the first COVID-19 vaccine, got approval from CEPI for seed funding in just seven minutes. The first volunteer received a COVID‑19 vaccine on March 16, 2020, just 63 days after the virus’s genome was sequenced. A licensed vaccine became available just 326 days later, and modeling estimates this rapid deployment prevented about 19.8 million deaths in the first year alone. Strategic foresight allowed science and business to act in an unprecedented way that saved millions upon millions of lives.

Innovation = Economic Growth

Strategic Foresight is what allows us to plan for innovation. Innovation is doing new things and doing old things better. And doing new things and doing old things better is what leads to real improvements in quality-of-life. Economists call this “productivity growth,” a measure of how much we are producing per-unit-input (in terms of capital and labor). Productivity growth is what makes our money go farther, because it takes less time and money to make the things we consume. Rising wages without innovation is what leads to inflation, because we’re paying ourselves more without being more effective.

Historically, innovation and productivity growth have been a strength of the American economy. Over the past decade, before COVID, the US economy was seeing productivity growth level off. This can have significant impacts on inflation and quality-of-life increases, which many people would argue they are feeling today. Innovation and continuous improvement are drivers of long-term economic prosperity, and Strategic Foresight can unleash these in your organization.

Where Do I Start?

There is a lot of info about Strategic Foresight available both here on my site as well as other places on the internet. Depending on your needs, there are some very well-established consultants who specialize in providing these services. With the help of AI, there is a lot that you can do on your own to start scanning the horizon and spotting trends that are relevant to your work. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, my door is always open. I encourage you to start with a simple ChatGPT search and go from there, because doing SOMETHING is infinitely better than doing nothing. The world is moving too fast to be caught flat-footed.