Why does your company need a foresight game?

Looking into the future helps make today’s decisions

Strategy — map it out yourself

Looking into the future helps make today’s decisions

I was conducting a foresight workshop for an international trading company two months ago. We used several classic foresight tools, such as historical analysis, emerging issues analysis, the Three Horizons model, etc. The team members were active and creative, and at the end of the day, they came up with three plausible futures scenarios. Participants were both proud of their work and confused. The latter happened because all three scenarios implied that the industry would go through a deep transformation, due to which their business, as it is now, would disappear. And that appeared to be a painful but valuable experience.

We are all under the illusion that the nearest future is more predictable than a distant one. It makes us rely on short-time action plans and neglect long-term thinking, especially taking into account that we are constantly motivated to do so by gurus who are not tired of reminding us t…