Strategic Foresight Meets Strategic Imagination

“Even as machines automate processes, collect data, and find patterns at light speed, humans will increasingly focus on higher-order strategic objectives that demand cognitive reasoning and decisioning. Our capacity to mentally explore the not-yet-existent allows us to deliberately imagine new things and shape the world around us. The processes associated with the practice of strategic foresight consider and experiment with scenarios that could be but are not currently the case.”
—Mimi Brooks

As the digital age accelerates, organizations must be prepared to leverage extraordinary technological breakthroughs while navigating sudden marketplace shifts, geopolitical disruptions, climate crises, and customer demands. Rather than focusing on risk avoidance, business leaders are once again sharpening their vision for the future by practicing strategic foresight — anticipating potential pitfalls and emerging opportunities before they occur.

Strategy and foresight diverged into separate corporate disciplines during the latter part of the last century. An absence of predictive tools and a growing reliance on interviews, internal surveys, and secondary sources meant that foresight was often seen as a product of weak or implausible scenarios that lacked rigor. This undermined its perceived relevance to the immediacy of business strategy. As a result, companies lost the symbiosis that potentially made the combination of strategy and foresight a powerful force for change.

Yet when seventy percent of companies reported a decline in sales during COVID-19*, leaders were forced to think in entirely novel ways, with many revisiting foresight to consider new options rather than dwell on strategic trajectories that had become virtually obsolete overnight. Mental models based on long-standing ways of doing business were confronted by a situation that few had anticipated. As the existing reality was threatened, the ability to observe and create entirely new relations between parts assumed new prominence.

Today, the emergence of formidable predictive tools and methodologies has resulted in strategic foresight assuming its current positioning as a systematic approach to ensuring organizational resiliency in the face of unforeseen disruptions. Areas such as signal detection, trend identification, and macro themes are being used to develop hypotheses about the future, plausible scenarios, and bridges to business strategy.

Furthermore, the use of strategic imagination to augment strategic foresight has become a new business weapon. This involves using a combination of human ingenuity and high-powered AI tools to construct multiple, concurrent views of the future that inform real-time planning and potential reaction to changes. This goes beyond simply trying to predict a singular future — it involves imagining and testing multiple possible futures, each with its own set of implications.

Unlike traditional static planning approaches, strategic imagination enables businesses to explore a range of possible futures and adapt to changing circumstances by actively reacting to signals and opportunities. Using digital twins and other virtual representations of physical systems that allow for simulation and experimentation, business strategists can test different scenarios and understand the potential consequences of their ultimate choices.

Simply by loosening the traditional correlation of decision-making to perceived reality, the use of strategic imagination introduces an important element of play that interacts with the practical wisdom gained from running a business. This challenges any tendency to assess new innovations and opportunities based on current systems and standards, and helps to develop the skills that anticipate deep, disruptive shifts in ways of doing business.

If we accept the premise that the essential value of a business strategy in the modern era is its originality, and that without originality a strategy is little more than a commodity, then play must become an integral part of the decision-making process. As such, when an organization adopts playful scenarios to assist in strategic thinking, several interrelated forms of imagination are ideally employed. These often constitute a complex interplay between descriptive, creative, and challenging scenarios.

At the highest level, it’s easiest to think of each of these approaches as follows:

• Descriptive imagination identifies patterns, finds and labels the data generated by analysis, and utilizes the business acumen gleaned from day-to-day experience.

• Creative imagination construes new possibilities from the combination, recombination, or transformation of proposed scenarios.

• Challenging imagination acts as a failsafe by contradicting any false sense of progress that comes from descriptive and creative scenarios.

Utilizing imagination in these ways is a particularly human capability. While almost all contemporary AI relies on noticing correlations, the human mind can go a step further through causal understanding and the creation of imaginative models that enable us to explore the space of what is possible. This allows us to elaborate on strategic foresights that may eventually be used to transform the business.

Generative AI, game-inspired simulations, and agentic workflows have an increasingly important role to play in augmenting strategic imagination. Specialized research tools are increasingly accessible through user-friendly platforms while Generative AI can factor in not only known risks and probabilities but also present novel ideas and scenarios. We can also use increasingly sophisticated AI applications to generate business scenarios, prototype new product strategies, or test organizational changes before these are unleashed in the real world.

With generative AI and multi-agent models, businesses can imagine entire digital “twins” of companies, markets, or even entire industries. Business strategists can “play” these scenarios, using foresight variables to see how potential changes impact a simulated environment.

The changing nature of business strategy (from long-term planning to real-time enactment and shaping) – it isn’t the right language, but it’s the right idea. I’d rather stay away from anticipating human imagination in machines.

While the traditional approach to corporate strategy was the creation of a long-term plan for developing and compounding competitive advantage, this being countermanded by the constant pressures of resource allocation and everyday operational tactics. Business leaders today are far more focused on real-time enactment and shaping. Yet these intrinsically tactical activities must also incorporate mindfulness of a desired future, which in turn must be regularly revisited through ever more sophisticated strategic foresight and imaginative approaches.

*International Labor Organization Statistic 2022