Strategic Foresight Boosts Profit - and is Kind of Like Therapy

Longitudinal research shows that foresight-literate companies achieved a 33% greater profitability than their competitors (Rohrbeck & Kum, 2018).  Since that study, the world has become even more volatile and hard to predict. Yet, beyond the high performing early adopters, businesses have yet to fully embrace foresight.

I love strategic foresight – and, kind of like therapy, those who could benefit most from it might also be hesitant to try it.

There are reasons why strategic, thoughtful leaders hesitate.  Strategic foresight can feel amorphous. How can we justify spending money on something that doesn’t seem immediately measurable?  Why learn a new approach when we’re stretched thin?  How can thinking about the distant future keep us going – or growing – now?   

It can be easier to make a leap of faith if you can see the dotted line between where you are and greater profitability. Case in point: lots of companies are looking for ways to apply AI, despite the 2024 study concluding that 95% of corporate AI implementations had no ROI (MIT NANDA).  Businesses have faith that, at some point, the experiments will pay off.  We make leaps of faith all the time.  Trying out foresight – even if only through a talk, workshop, innovation sprint, or signal swap – is a leap of faith that happens to have good evidence supporting it (see that 33% greater profitability, above). 

Maybe your team is already working full tilt.  Foresight can save you time by preventing costly mistakes.  It attunes you to signs of systemic change and helps you separate them from noise.  It can help you see, quickly, when you might need to refine or change strategy.  Further, your team’s energy isn’t just about workload; it also relies on engagement.  A preliminary study suggests that participating in foresight increases employee engagement (Chermack et al. 2020).

You might feel like foresight’s payoff is too far off.  Foresight does, after all, explore the future, but in the interests of fueling better decisions now.  Consider Melanie Perkins, the founder of Canva, which is currently valued at $65 billion US.  That makes her the most successful female tech founder and one of the most successful tech founders ever.  She credits some of her success to a foresight practice – the creation of transformative future scenarios in which she explores ideal futures – even though she doesn’t immediately see the role that Canva might play in helping bring those futures into being.  Like many organizations that use scenario planning, however, she looks for where her company’s levers of influence are, and how it can contribute to and in potential futures.  From there, she cascades down to actionable, measurable steps (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast).

If you want to start exploring foresight, have a look at our services, which include one-and-done offerings, or book a call to see whether foresight offers the right tools for your current situation.