Every executive I work with wants the same superpower: to see what's coming before their competitors do. It feels like the ultimate edge. Spot the disruption early, and you win.
Except the research says that's not quite how it works.
The largest study of its kind tracked firms over seven years and found that those judged "future-prepared" in 2008 went on to outperform the average by roughly a third on profitability and by around 200% on market-capitalisation growth. The firms with foresight deficiencies? Ninety-one percent of them stood still or slid backwards (Rohrbeck & Kum, 2018). So foresight pays. Handsomely.
But here's the bit that should change how you spend your time. Across two major reviews of the field, the finding that keeps surfacing is this:
Foresight almost never improves performance directly. It works only when it changes a decision. (Adegbile, Sarpong & Meissner, 2017; Marinković et al., 2022).
Seeing isn't the hard part. Acting is.
We've been investing in the wrong end of the problem
Most organisations pour their foresight budget into the front end — scanning, trend reports, horizon-scanning decks, the occasional futurist on stage. It feels productive. It generates impressive PowerPoint.
And then nothing happens.
George Day and Paul Schoemaker, who spent years studying why some firms see change coming and others get blindsided, use a lovely analogy. Your organisation is like the human eye. There's a small, high-resolution focal point, the day job, the current numbers, the things you already know to watch. Around it sits a vast, blurry periphery, and that's exactly where disruption first shows up as a weak signal (Day & Schoemaker, 2006). Their uncomfortable conclusion: fewer than one in five firms develop enough peripheral vision to stay competitive.
Honeywell saw the smart thermostat coming. Nest got there first anyway. The signal wasn't missed; it just never commanded enough senior attention to trigger action (Day & Schoemaker, 2019).
That's the pattern. The failure is rarely perception. It's the gap between noticing and doing.
Four ways to think about foresight (and what's wrong with each)
If you go looking for a method, you'll find a crowded market. Four families of thinking dominate the serious literature. Knowing their limits matters as much as knowing their strengths.
Scenario planning. The classic, made famous by Shell. Instead of betting on one forecast, you build a handful of plausible, divergent futures and stress-test your strategy against all of them. It's brilliant for breaking the spell of a single dominant assumption, recent work in the Strategic Management Journal shows multiple-scenario analysis genuinely helps leaders overcome strategic persistence and reorient (Healey & Hodgkinson, 2024). The catch: quality varies wildly, and the workshops themselves can curdle into political theatre or groupthink if you let them (Bowman & Parks, 2024).
Maturity models. Rohrbeck's framework scores your capability across three Ps — Perceiving (spotting signals), Prospecting (interpreting them), and Probing (running experiments to learn before you commit). It's the most empirically robust model out there. The risk is that a maturity score invites box-ticking. A high grade is not the same as a changed decision.
Vigilance. Day and Schoemaker's emphasis on leadership attention. Strong on diagnosis, grounded in how people actually think — but thinner on the mechanics of turning a complacent organisation into a vigilant one.
Foresight as a dynamic capability. The newest, most academically fashionable framing: foresight as the "sensing" muscle that feeds agility and lets you do two things at once, run today's business while building tomorrow's. Intellectually elegant. Still mostly theory awaiting proof.
No single model wins. They illuminate different parts of the same elephant.
So what should you actually do?
Strip away the frameworks and the evidence points to a handful of practical moves.
Match your effort to your turbulence. Foresight is relative. A stable consumer-staples business needs less of it than a semiconductor firm staring down a technology cliff (Rohrbeck & Kum, 2018). Don't buy a Shell-sized scenario function for a business that doesn't face Shell-sized uncertainty.
Invest in Probing, not just Perceiving. The most neglected capability is the cheapest to start: small, bounded experiments that let you learn before you bet the company. Adobe and Intuit didn't just notice the shift to the cloud — they ran experiments and then reallocated decisively. The trend report was never the point.
Put scenarios in the room where decisions get made. Not in a report that lands on a shelf. The research is blunt: foresight only earns its keep when it's wired into the actual strategy conversation (Lehr et al., 2017). If your futures work doesn't end in a changed budget line, it was theatre.
Protect the periphery. Weak signals die in the gaps between functions. Give someone explicit accountability for tracking and escalating them. Carve out leadership attention deliberately — the single scarcest resource you have (Schoemaker, 2019).
Design against your own biases. Bring in cognitive diversity, independent facilitation and a licensed devil's advocate. Test scenarios against your current strategy, not in flattering parallel to it.
A note on AI, since I've written about that extensively. Generative tools can slash the cost of building scenarios and scanning the horizon. They can also produce plausible-sounding rubbish at industrial scale. Use them to augment the human judgement that the evidence says is decisive, not to replace it.
The uncomfortable truth
Foresight isn't a crystal ball. It's a discipline for acting wisely now, while the future is still uncertain.
The firms that win aren't the ones that see furthest. They're the ones that turn what they see into a decision before their rivals do. Seeing sooner is worth very little if you act later.
Which raises the only question that really matters for your leadership team: when you next spot a weak signal from the edge of your market — what, specifically, will you do about it?
References
Adegbile, A., Sarpong, D. & Meissner, D. (2017) 'Strategic Foresight for Innovation Management: A Review and Research Agenda', International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 14(4).
Bowman, G. & Parks, R. W. (2024) 'Between episodes of strategy: Sociomateriality, sensemaking, and dysfunction in a scenario planning process', Journal of Business Research, 179, 114690.
Day, G. S. & Schoemaker, P. J. H. (2006) Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company. Harvard Business School Press.
Day, G. S. & Schoemaker, P. J. H. (2019) See Sooner, Act Faster: How Vigilant Leaders Thrive in an Era of Digital Turbulence. MIT Press.
Healey, M. P. & Hodgkinson, G. P. (2024) 'Overcoming strategic persistence: Effects of multiple scenario analysis on strategic reorientation', Strategic Management Journal, 45(8), pp. 1423–1445.
Lehr, T., Lorenz, U., Willert, M. & Rohrbeck, R. (2017) 'Scenario-based strategizing: Advancing the applicability in strategists' teams', Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 124, pp. 214–224.
Marinković, M., Al-Tabbaa, O., Khan, Z. & Wu, J. (2022) 'Corporate foresight: A systematic literature review and future research trajectories', Journal of Business Research, 144, pp. 289–311.
Rohrbeck, R. & Kum, M. E. (2018) 'Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis', Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 129, pp. 105–116.
Schoemaker, P. J. H. (2019) 'Attention and foresight in organizations', Futures & Foresight Science, 1(1), e5.