Foresight: The Antidote to Negligence and Our Collective Search for Agility

The future is undoubtedly important to our societies, organizations, and personal lives. Though many of us are fascinated by the emerging impacts and social trends of globalization, digitalization, and democratization, some remain anxious while most corporations continue investing in hiring big-name consultancies for strategic and/ or tactical choices, forfeiting their right to decision-making. It is truly perplexing how quickly we, human beings, willingly shut down consciousness and push away core responsibilities that may impact and shape our very own day-to-day realities.

“To be human,”?writes?Dan Falk, an award-winning Canadian science journalist,?“is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness.?Without it, there would be no planning, no building, no culture; without an imagined picture of the future, our civilization would not exist.” True as it may sound, when standing with a group of decision-makers frantically focused on profit-building and continuously seeking enhanced organizational agility at the same time, where does that consciousness sit in the veins of a corporate authority chain?

What is Foresight?

Foresight is the cognitive ability to creatively envision possible futures, and understand the complexity and ambiguity of systems. In the simplest terms, it can be considered as one’s competence for looking into and planning/ prepping for the future.

Unfortunately, foresight has a bad reputation. It is often undermined as it gets labeled as a prophecy, but it is neither prophecy nor prediction. It does not aim to prophesy or predict the future – to unveil it as if it were predetermined – rather, it helps us build it. It invites us to consider the future as something that we can create and/or co-shape, rather than as something already decided and given.

From a scientific point of view, foresight holds two facets: (1) a mental and sensory representation of things that are not yet present or a sense or feeling of what may be or what may come, and (2) a memory that connects the past and what we know to do with the future and what may be.

From a practical perspective, the art of leading may be considered as a capacity for meta-analysis of the past, present, and future. Harvard psychologist, Daniel Schacter puts it this way: “ <The brain is> a fundamentally prospective organ that is designed to use information from the past and the present to generate scenarios about the future. Memory can be thought of as a tool used by the brain to generate simulations of possible future events… We tend to think of memory as having primarily to do with the past… And maybe one reason we have it is so that we can have a warm feeling when we reminisce, and so on. But I think the thing that has been neglected is its role in allowing us to predict and simulate the future.”

In other words, where we don’t understand our past, we may become ignorant of many of the probabilities and possibilities presented later. When we spend too much time in the past, we can lose sight. And, where we aren’t sufficiently attentive to the present, we may walk by what the needs of today. To that end, foresight requires a conscious floating in a sincere, freedom of time, otherwise referred to as “mental time travel.”

To mentally time-travel, however, we need to activate our semantic memory, involving the capacity to recall words, concepts, or numbers, and our basic knowledge of facts about the world helping paint a backdrop for the imagined scene. Then, the exercise of foresight practice starts with growing attention to the experience of every instant, becoming aware and engaging in predicting, creating, and leading our own realities, not only through cognitive or “real” evidence but also through activation of our consciousness and intuition.

Agility Requires Foresight and Fragility?

In an organizational context, corporate foresight is often confused with strategic thinking. The two are related yet different in that the exercise of foresight is more imaginative and innovative. There is also an action orientation in foresight, which strategic thinking doesn’t require, along with creating participatory ownership and consideration of a variety of alternatives. This enables collective organisms such as firms to detect (dis)continuous?change?early, interpret its consequences, and inform future courses of action to ensure the long-term response in lieu of survival/ coping.

In our research with Stanford University’s CCARE, we have been able to validate in environments, where leaders are connected to reality, willingly invest in co-ideation and scenario planning, employees find space to gauge their conscious and tap into their intuition during a process of decision making, organizations have a greater time experiencing agility. In contrast, in the absence of foresight exercise, we found organizations struggle to show preparedness in the face of new opportunities. In these environments, negligence was prominent, leaders focused on one aspect of business, employees reported all was a surprise, and change lost its strategic value.

The exercise of foresight has an immense impact on business outcomes. Rohrbeck and Kum?developed a model in 2018, looking to understand and assess the “future preparedness” (FP) of a firm. We found the makeup of FP to be highly correlated to the scientific makeup of foresight. With this formula, they matched mega-data from 2008 and performance in 2015. They found that future-prepared firms outperformed the average by a 33% higher profitability, by 200% in growth while firms with deficiencies face with a performance discount of 37% to 108%. In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us because when we can learn from the relevant past, see what’s required in the environment today, and anticipate (forecast and predict) the relevant probable future, we can better imagine, prepare and experiment with possibilities.

Where To Begin?

Recognize the concept of ‘busyness’ gets in our way of exercising foresight, allowing for data intake, activation of consciousness, and intuition as leaders. Our current world of work is obsessed with inquiring about space despite the paradoxes this state presents for its people. The need to constantly master space across multiple boundaries limits our capacity for consciousness, beauty, and human calibration. It is ironic then in hopes to achieve anew, we patch time and resources for problem-solving repeatedly, only to end up feeling more distracted, disrupted, and lost.

Another hurdle is around ‘self-righteousness’. Many of us struggle to say, “I don’t know”, “I missed that”, or “Help me understand it better, please.” Not only our ignorance is often invisible to us and we don’t know how to unravel it, but we also have a huge discomfort around demonstrating vulnerability.

The best late example of this in the private sector has been with technology firms exercising large reductions in force claiming, “they didn’t see it coming.” Similarly, in recent natural disasters, public leaders unable to activate their capacity to save human lives were claiming, “it is impossible to predict such scales”, you get the point…

Foresight today may not be a science, and it may not fully become one, yet it remains a critical attribute in realizing the future of work and leadership. The truth is if we are serious about gaining organizational agility, then, we need to grow systemic courage to step back into an unknown space, take the distance we need to breathe as decision-makers on a regular basis, keep each other accountable to focus/ refocus and activate our consciousness before signing off a vision. If you are unsure where to begin, below is a five-step process that can guide you into your next effort:

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Foresight is also one of the core human attributes found in a collaborative study we did with?Stanford University’s CCARE?worth investing in if we aim to expand individual capacity and grow organizational resilience as 21st-century leaders. For more information about?Human-Centered Leadership?can be found in our?book?or via our?short course?on LinkedIn Learning. Thank you!