Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.
– Milan Kundera
My intuition is that most organizations do not think about the future as often or as deeply as they should. Amidst widespread sentiment that long-term thinking is necessary and helpful, many leaders discount the future, preferring quantitative forecasts to speculative scenarios despite the fact that there are no future facts, only assumptions.
The utility of foresight is in revealing and structuring assumptions about reality and creating theories of change about prospective futures, which facilitates greater strategic clarity and thus better decisions and more purposeful actions in the present. Then, as new information emerges, organizations can adapt to change while maintaining strategic coherence. The benefits are greater long-term resilience and proactive imagination—the ability to create new futures rather than simply reacting to what happens next.
Reasons for this include:
What these issues have in common is that they are the product of complex adaptive systems—indeed, a sprawling and entangled system of systems. Complex systems like societies, economies, and organizations contain independent actors with varying degrees of agency, can reorganize to achieve goals, display non-linear and ambiguous causality, and are in perpetual flux.
Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework makes the following distinction between ordered, complex and chaotic systems—per the Cynefin Wiki:
At its most basic, the Cynefin® framework allows us to distinguish between three different kinds of systems:
Ordered systems in which cause and effect relationships are either clear or discoverable through analysis;
Complex systems in which the only way to understand the system is to interact;
Chaotic systems in which turbulence prevails and immediate stabilizing action is required.
Consider then, the degree to which many organizations operate by best practices. Because humans are uncomfortable with uncertainty, we seek prior examples and learn through retrospective coherence and narrative—tactics that help us understand ordered systems but are maladapted in complexity.
So, the primary object of foresight is anticipating emerging change and influencing preferable futures in complex systems.
This means that firms will need to develop greater systems awareness and internal foresight capacity, either via guided programs or dedicated resources and new capabilities. In either case, it is essential that the organization learns by doing. In my consulting work with large organizations, I notice a significant difference in programs where leaders are engaged in sense-making and generative imagination compared to those where they are consumers of information. In these programs, teams naturally develop a shared understanding and vernacular—a new way of thinking about and working with the future.
Consequently, my view is that foresight should be highly contextual (integrated within the organization and its operating environment) and collective (engaging a broad range of stakeholders in sense-making and co-creation).