by Ravi VS
“Everyone’s chasing certainty.”
That was the moment the room fell silent during a late-night foresight roundtable I had with a few thinkers from Kenya, Germany, and South Korea. We’d gathered to discuss the future of strategic foresight — but quickly found ourselves stuck in a deeper question:
Are we just forecasting better versions of the past?
Because that’s what it feels like, doesn’t it?
We’ve built tools, models, and frameworks to map out the future, but most of them rely on data from yesterday. Horizon scanning, scenario planning, Delphi rounds… all incredibly valuable, yet still tethered to known variables.
But what if foresight isn’t about knowing more — it’s about un-knowing better?
Let me take you somewhere strange. Back to a moment in Doctor Strange.
The Strange Shift Remember the scene where Stephen Strange is desperately trying to fix his broken hands using science, surgery, and technology? None of it works — until he stumbles into Kamar-Taj and learns that healing isn’t always physical.
That was his moment of foresight. Not data-driven — but dimension-breaking. Not logical — but metaphysical.
The Ancient One didn’t offer him a prognosis. She offered him a paradigm shift.
And that’s what strategic foresight must become. We don’t need better predictions. We need better perceptions.
🧭 Beyond Foresight: The Search for Non-Linear Sensemaking Let’s be real. Most organisations don’t practise foresight — they practise professional guessing, dressed up in slides.
They ask: What will happen in 2030? When they should be asking: What could break our frame of reality before 2030 even arrives?
Here are a few better questions:
Can we design futures that don’t yet have language?
Can we rehearse for futures that feel impossible?
Can we develop narratives that outlive the news cycle?
What if we stop thinking in five-year plans and start thinking in planetary arcs?
Because if foresight is just a roadmap, we’re assuming the terrain won’t change. But what if the terrain is dissolving, shifting, regenerating in real time?
🚪 The Futures We Don’t Know How to See Let me sketch a few fragments from the edge:
Ambient Foresight – Futures sensing built into everyday systems. Your smart home doesn’t just adjust temperature — it warns you of social collapse probabilities in your region.
Indigenous Foresight – Reclaiming wisdom traditions and cycles that never viewed time as linear. Futures rooted in land, language, and listening — not in graphs.
Bio-Futures Literacy – Learning to read ecosystems the way we read stock tickers. Trees as timekeepers. Soil as a strategic asset.
Dream-Driven Policy Labs – Designing policies not from economic KPIs but from collective dreams. Policy borne from poetry, not just procurement. These are not fantasy. These are already emerging in the margins.
We just haven’t trained ourselves to see them — yet.
🌀 Why Causality Is the Cage The trap isn’t just linear thinking. It’s cause-and-effect thinking.
We assume that by identifying inputs and outputs, we can control the system. But what if the system isn’t causal — it’s entangled, emergent, alive?
We thought the future was something to forecast. What if it’s something to befriend?
📡 Foresight Is Not a Tool — It’s a Frequency This piece isn’t to teach you strategic foresight.
It’s to challenge whether you’ve ever truly practised it.
Foresight isn’t about getting better at strategy decks. It’s about attuning yourself to the frequencies most people ignore — the whispers, not the shouts.
It’s not about planning for the next quarter. It’s about sensing the next question humanity must ask itself.
And letting that question rearrange you.
🛠️ Final Thought: Time to Break the Compass: We may not need a clearer map. We may need the courage to walk off it entirely.
The next breakthrough in foresight may not come from a workshop — but from a wild idea no one’s brave enough to say out loud.
It may come from refusing to future-proof — and instead, future-feel.
It may arrive when someone asks: What if strategic foresight isn’t about seeing the future… but about becoming worthy of it?
That’s where I’m placing my bets.
Not just on what’s coming. But on what’s becoming.
So, ask yourself:
Are you tweaking your toolkit? Or stepping into dimensions your strategy can’t yet comprehend?
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