by Robyn Bolton | Jul 23, 2025 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples
What does a lightning strike in a Spanish forest have to do with your next leadership meeting? More than you think.
On June 14, 2014, lightning struck a forest on Spain’s northeast coast, only 60 miles from Barcelona. Within hours, flames 16 to 33 feet high raced out of control toward populated areas, threatening 27,000 acres of forest, an area larger than the city of Boston.
Everything – data, instincts, decades of firefighting doctrine – prioritized saving the entire forest and protecting the coastal towns.
Instead, the fire commanders chose to deliberately let 2,057 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, burn.
The result? They saved the other 25,000 acres (an area the size of San Francisco), protected the coastal communities, and created a natural firebreak that would protect the region for decades. By accepting some losses, they prevented catastrophic ones.
The Fear Trap That’s Strangling Your Business
The Tivissa fire’s triumph happened because firefighters found the courage to escape what researchers call the “fear trap” – the tendency to focus exclusively on defending against known, measurable risks.
Despite research proving that defending against predictable, measurable risks through defensive strategies consistently fails in uncertain and dynamic scenarios, firefighter “best practices” continue to advocate this approach.
Sound familiar? It should. Most executives today are trapped in exactly this pattern.
We’re in the fire right now. Financial markets are yo-yoing, AI threatens to disrupt everything, and consumer behaviors are shifting.
Most executives are falling into the Fear Trap by doubling down on protecting their existing business and pouring resources into defending against predictable risks. Yet the real threats, the ones you can’t measure or model, continue to pound the business.
While you’re protecting last quarter’s wins, tomorrow’s disruption is spreading unchecked.
Four Principles for Creative Decision-Making Under Fire
The decision to cede certain areas wasn’t hasty but based on four principles enabling leaders in any situation to successfully navigate uncertainty.
PRINCIPLE 1: A Predictable Situation is a Safe Situation. Stop trying to control the uncontrollable. Standard procedures work in predictable situations but fail in unprecedented challenges.
Put it in Practice: Instead of creating endless contingency plans, build flexibility and agility into operations and decision-making.
PRINCIPLE 2: Build Credibility Through Realistic Expectations. Reducing uncertainty requires realism about what can be achieved. Fire commanders mapped out precisely which areas around Tivissa would burn and which would be saved, then communicated these hard truths and the considered trade-offs to officials and communities before implementing their strategy, building trust and preventing panic as the selected areas burned.
Put it in practice: Stop promising to protect everything and set realistic expectations about what you can control. Then communicate priorities, expectations, and trade-offs frequently, transparently, and clearly with all key stakeholders.
PRINCIPLE 3: Include the future in your definition of success: Traditional firefighting protects immediate assets at risk. The Tivissa firefighters expanded this to include future resilience, recognizing that saving everything today could jeopardize the region tomorrow.
Put it in practice: Be transparent about how you define the Common Good in your organization, then reinforce it by making hard choices about where to compete and where to retreat. The goal isn’t to avoid all losses – it’s to maximize overall organizational health.
PRINCIPLE 4: Use uncertainty to build for tomorrow: Firefighters didn’t just accept that 2,057 acres would burn – they strategically chose which acres to let burn to create maximum future advantage, protecting the region for generations.
Put it in practice: Evaluate every response to uncertainty on whether it better positions you for future challenges. Leverage the disruption to build capabilities, market positions, and organizational structures that strengthen you for future uncertainty.
Your Next Move
When the wind shifted and the fire exploded, firefighters had to choose between defending everything (and likely losing it all) or accepting strategic losses to ensure overall wins.
You’re facing the same choice right now.
Like the firefighters, your breakthrough might come not from fighting harder against uncertainty, but from learning to work with it strategically.
What are you willing to let burn to save what matters most?
by Robyn Bolton | Jul 16, 2025 | Leadership, Strategic Foresight
You’ve done everything to set Strategic Foresight efforts up for success. Executive authority? Check. Challenging inputs? Check. Process integration? Check. Now you just need to flip the switch and you’re off to the races.
Not so fast.
While the wrong set-up is guaranteed to cause failure, the right set-up doesn’t guarantee success. Research shows that strategic foresight initiatives with the right set-up fail because of “organizational pathologies” that sabotage even well-designed efforts.
If you aren’t leading the right people to do the right things in the right way, you’re not going to get the impact you need.
Here’s what to watch out for (and what to do when it happens).
Your Teams Misunderstand Foresight’s Purpose
People naturally assume that strategic foresight predicts the future. When it doesn’t, they abandon it faster than last year’s digital transformation initiative.
Shell learned this the hard way. In 1965, they built the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool designed to predict cash flow based on trends. It was abandoned because executives feared “it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”
When they shifted from prediction to preparation, specifically to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future,” strategic foresight became an invaluable decision-making tool.
Help your team approach strategic foresight as preparation, not prediction, by measuring success by the improvement in discussion and decision-making, not scenario accuracy. When teams build mental flexibility rather than make predictions, wrong scenarios stop being failed scenarios.
People are Paralyzed by Fear of Being Wrong
Even when your teams understand foresight’s purpose, managers are often unwilling “to use foresight to plan beyond a few quarters, fearing that any decisions today could be wrong tomorrow.”
This is profoundly human. As Webb wrote, “When faced with uncertainty, we become inflexible. We revert to historical patterns, we stick to a predetermined plan, or we simply refuse to adopt a new mental model.” We nod along in scenario sessions, then make decisions exactly like we always have.
Shell’s scenario planning efforts succeeded because it made being wrong acceptable. Even though executives initially scoffed at the idea of oil prices quadrupling, they prepared for the scenario and took near-term “no regrets” decisions to restructure their portfolio.
To help people get past their fear, reward them for making foresight-informed decisions. For example, establish incentives and promotion criteria where exploring “wrong” scenarios leads to career advancement.
Your Culture Confuses Activity with Achievement
Between insight and action, the Tyranny of Now reigns. In even the most committed organizations, the very real and immediate needs of the business call us away from our planning efforts and consume our time and energy, meaning strategic foresight is embraced only when it doesn’t interfere with their “real” jobs.
Disney’s approach made strategic foresight a required element of people’s “real jobs” by integrating foresight activities and insights directly into performance management and strategic planning. When foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing in 2012, Disney began preparing for that future by actively exploring and investing in new potential solutions.
Resist the Tyranny of Now’s pull by making strategic foresight activities just as tyrannical – require decisions based on foresight insights to occur in 90 days or less. These decisions should trigger resource allocation reviews, even if the resources are relatively small (e.g., one or a few people, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars). If strategic foresight doesn’t force hard choices about investments and priorities, it’s activity without achievement.
How You Lead and What People Do Determine Strategic Foresight’s Success
Executive authority, challenging inputs, and process integration are necessary but not sufficient. Success requires conquering the deeper organizational and human behaviors that determine whether strategic foresight is a corporate ritual or a competitive advantage.
by Robyn Bolton | Jul 8, 2025 | Strategic Foresight, Strategy
You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure. Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used. You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success. You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.
So, where do you start?
Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them. But you are smarter than that. You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.
Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access
Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.
While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.
Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans. Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.
Start by asking:
- Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
- What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
- How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?
Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions
If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.
Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.
Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.
Start by asking these questions:
- Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
- Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
- Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?
Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes
Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.
Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.
When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true. They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.
Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.
Start by asking these questions:
- How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
- How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
- How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?
Three Steps. One Outcome.
Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success. But they’re still not a guarantee.
Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.
by Robyn Bolton | Jun 25, 2025 | Leadership, Stories & Examples, Strategy
Convinced that Strategic Foresight shows you a path through uncertainty? Great! Just don’t rush off, hire futurists, run some workshops, and start churning out glossy reports.
Activity is not achievement.
Learning from those who have achieved, however, is an excellent first activity. Following are the stories of two very different companies from different industries and eras that pursued Strategic Foresight differently yet succeeded because they tied foresight to the P&L.
Shell: From Laggard to Leader, One Decision at a Time
It’s hard to imagine Shell wasn’t always dominant, but back in the 1960s, it struggled to compete. Tired of being blindsided by competitors and external events, they sought an edge.
It took multiple attempts and more than 10 years to find it.
In 1959, Shell set up their Group Planning department, but its reliance on simple extrapolations of past trends to predict the future only perpetuated the status quo.
In 1965, Shell introduced the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool to predict cash flow based on current results and forecasted changes in oil consumption. But this approach was abandoned because executives feared “that it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”
Then, in 1967, in a small 18th-floor office in London, a new approach to ongoing planning began. Unlike past attempts, the goal was not to predict the future. It was to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future.”
Within a few years, their success was obvious. Shell executives stopped treating scenarios as interesting intellectual exercises and started using them to stress-test actual capital allocation decisions.
This doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly embraced or even believed the scenarios. In fact, when scenarios suggested that oil prices could spike dramatically, most executives thought it was far-fetched. Yet Shell leadership used those scenarios to restructure their entire portfolio around different types of oil and to develop new capabilities.
The result? When the 1973 oil crisis hit and oil prices quadrupled from $2.90 to $11.65 per barrel, Shell was the only major oil company ready. While competitors scrambled and lost billions, Shell turned the crisis into “big profits.”
Disney: From Missed Growth Goals to Unprecedented Growth
In 2012, Walt Disney International’s (WDI) aggressive growth targets collided with a challenging global labor market, and traditional HR approaches weren’t cutting it.
Andy Bird, Chairman of Walt Disney International, emphasized the criticality of the situation when he said, “The actions we make today are going to make an impact 10 to 20 years down the road.”
So, faced with an unprecedented challenge, the team pursued an unprecedented solution: they built a Strategic Foresight capability.
WDI trained over 500 leaders across 45 countries, representing five percent of its workforce, in Strategic Foresight. More importantly, Disney integrated strategic foresight directly into their strategic planning and performance management processes, ensuring insights drove business decisions rather than gathering dust in reports.
For example, foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing (remember, this was 2012) and that consumers wanted more control over when and how they consumed content. This insight directly shaped Disney+’s development.
The results speak volumes. While traditional media companies struggled with streaming disruption, Disney+ reached 100 million subscribers in just 16 months.
Two Paths. One Result.
Shell and Disney integrated Strategic Foresight differently – the former as a tool to make high-stakes individual decisions, the latter as an organizational capability to affect daily decisions and culture.
What they have in common is that they made tomorrow’s possibilities accountable to today’s decisions. They did this not by treating strategic foresight as prediction, but as preparation for competitive advantage.
Ready to turn these insights into action? Next week, we’ll dive into the tools in the Strategic Foresight toolbox and how you and your team can use them to develop strategic foresight that drives informed decisions.
by Robyn Bolton | Jun 17, 2025 | Leadership, Strategy
Are you spooked by the uncertainty and volatility that defines not just our businesses but our everyday lives? Have you hunkered down, stayed the course, and hoped that this too shall pass? Are you starting to worry that this approach can’t go on forever but unsure of what to do next? CONGRATULATIONS, consultants have heard your cries and are rolling out a shiny new framework promising to solve everything: Strategic Foresight.
Strategic foresight is the latest silver bullet for navigating our chaotic, unpredictable world.
Remember in 2016 when Agility was going to save us all? Good times.
As much as I love rolling my eyes at the latest magic framework, I have to be honest – Strategic Foresight can live up to the hype. If you do it right.
What Strategic Foresight Actually Is (Spoiler: Not a Silver Bullet)
A LOT is being published about Strategic Foresight (I received 7 newsletters on the topic last week) and everyone has their own spin. So let’s cut through the hype and get back to basics
What it is: Strategic foresight is the systematic exploration of multiple possible futures to anticipate opportunities and risks, enabling informed decisions today to capture advantages tomorrow.
There’s a lot there so let’s break it down:
- Systematic exploration: This isn’t guessing, predicting, or opining. This is a rigorous and structured approach
- Multiple possible futures: Examines multiple scenarios because we can’t possibly forecast or predict the one future that will occur
- Enabling informed decisions today: This isn’t an academic exercise you revisit once a year. It informs and guides decisions and actions this year.
- Capture advantages tomorrow: Positions you to respond to change with confidence and beat your competition to the punch
How it fits: Strategic Foresight doesn’t replace what you’re doing. It informs and drives it.
| Approach |
Timeline |
Focus |
| Strategic Foresight |
5-20+ years |
Explore possible futures |
| Strategic Planning |
3-5 years |
Create competitive advantage |
| Business Planning |
Annual cycles |
Execute specific actions |
The sequence matters: Foresight → Strategic Planning → Business Planning.
This sequence also explains why Strategic Foresight is so hot right now. Systemic change used to take years, even decades, to unfold. As a result, you could look out 3-5 years, anticipate what would be next, and you would probably be right.
Now, systemic change can happen overnight and be undone by noon the next day. Whatever you think will happen will probably be wrong and in ways you can’t anticipate, let alone plan for and execute against.
Strategic Foresight’s rigorous, multi-input approach gives us the illusion of control in a world that seems to be spinning out of it.
How to Avoid the Illusion and Get the Results.
Personally, I love the illusion of control BUT as a business practice, I don’t recommend it.
Strategic Foresight’s benefits will stay an illustion if you don’t:
- Develop in-house strategic foresight capabilities. Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that companies using rigorous foresight methodologies consistently outperform those stuck in reactive mode. Shell’s legendary scenario planning helped them navigate oil crises while competitors flailed. Disney’s Natural Foresight® Framework keeps them ahead of entertainment trends that blindside others.
- Integrate foresight into your annual strategic planning cycle: Strategic foresight is a front-end effort that makes your 3-5 year strategy more robust. If you treat it like a separate exercise where you hire futurists, and run some workshops, and check the Strategic Foresight box, you won’t see any benefits or results.
What’s Next?
Strategic foresight isn’t a silver bullet, but it can be a path through uncertainty to advantage and growth.
The difference between success and failure comes down to execution. Do you treat it as prediction or preparation? Do you integrate it with existing planning or silo it in innovation labs?
Ready to separate the hype from the hard results? Our next post shows you what two industry leaders learned about turning foresight into competitive advantage and how you can use those lessons to your benefit
