This article was first published in Harvard Business Review and is available via subscription.
Firms that are prepared for the future are more likely to become industry outperformers, achieving superior profitability and market-cap growth. But how can companies prepare in uncertain times?
BCG’s Wendi Backler, Alan Iny, and Moe Turner have found that a minority of companies turn uncertainty into advantage using strategic foresight—the disciplined practice of scanning for change, exploring multiple plausible futures, and using those insights to make better choices in the present.
Foresight exercises are common across organizations, but most are simple and patchwork or the efforts rarely change decisions; intuition plays an outsized role. In this article, the authors identify patterns of behavior that differentiate companies that use strategic foresight effectively. Organizations looking to build this capability can begin with a simple retrospective to reveal what is hindering foresight leadership.