With the new year, I am starting a new series of posts consisting of brief reflections on various dimensions related to Change Management. Each week, I will review concepts, mental models, approaches, and practical cases that can help you tackle Change Management in your professional projects. I will also share resources, authors, and readings to help you delve deeper into each topic. Feel free to share your perspective in the comments or contact me to continue the discussion.
FORESIGHT
On this first occasion, I felt like starting with a concept I consider to be of the utmost importance: Foresight, understood as discipline that helps organizations explore, anticipate, and prepare for possible futures to make better strategic decisions in the present. It is important to note that Foresight does not aim to predict the future, but rather to:
- Identify early signals of change
- Explore alternative scenarios
- Detect emerging risks and latent opportunities
- Design more resilient and adaptive strategies
From a Change Management perspective, Foresight acts as a change radar that enables people and organizations to prepare before change becomes urgent, traumatic, or merely reactive. Foresight without Change is futurology; Change without Foresight is reaction. True transformation happens when both meet.
1️⃣ Why is Foresight Important Today?
In a world where volatility and uncertainty are at local highs, one of the most important capabilities for navigating organizations is the ability to gain an early understanding of where the future might go and to prepare for it.
🔭 From Foresight to the Transformation Roadmap
A common mistake in many organizations is conducting brilliant Foresight exercises and then archiving them. The real value appears when Foresight triggers sequential decisions over time, moving from scenario to roadmap, typically following these steps:
Step 1 · Define Relevant Scenarios (not too many)
Work with 3–4 plausible scenarios:
- Continuist scenario
- Disruptive scenario
- Regulatory/limiting scenario
- Accelerated opportunity scenario
Each scenario should answer a clear question: What really changes for our business and our people?
Step 2 · Translate Scenarios into Operational Implications
For each scenario, answer in four layers:
- Strategic: What role do I want my organization to have in that scenario, and what conscious decisions will I make to achieve it?
- Operating Model: Which processes will break or be strained, and how should I reconfigure them for the new context?
- Capabilities: What skills, organizational models, or technologies do I need to deploy to navigate that scenario?
- Culture: What behaviors should I encourage, and which should I penalize, so the organization adjusts its culture for the new context?
This is where Foresight starts to speak the language of Change Management.
Step 3 · Identify the “No-Regret Moves”
Analyze all scenarios and look for initiatives that:
- Are useful in almost all possible futures
- Reduce structural risks
- Increase optionality
Typical examples: upskilling team members, cleaning and standardizing company processes, improving data governance, developing new leadership models. These initiatives form the core of the roadmap, which should then be developed into a short-, medium-, and long-term execution plan.
- Horizon 1 (0–12 months): Prepare pilots, awareness campaigns, seek “quick wins,” and develop change narratives. Also, define what to stop doing, what to start, and what to develop or learn.
- Horizon 2 (12–36 months): Scale up, redesign processes, define and implement new organizational architectures, act on incentive systems.
- Horizon 3 (36+ months): Reimagine the company in the new context, execute new business models, make more structural decisions based on initial pilot learnings.
2️⃣ Other Related Methodological Frameworks: Sensemaking
A key ally of Foresight is Sensemaking.
- Sensemaking looks at the present and recent past: it helps interpret what is happening, why, and what it means for the organization and its people. It seeks shared coherence and reduces ambiguity.
- Foresight explores possible futures, identifies weak signals, and deliberately expands the field of what is imaginable. Its function is not to be right, but to broaden the range of strategic options and challenge implicit assumptions.
When there is Foresight without Sensemaking, scenarios generate confusion and are perceived as abstract, distant, or unreal. Organizational cynicism may arise: “Here we go with another strategic exercise.” When there is Sensemaking without Foresight, the interpretation of the present becomes shortsighted, using past mental models to explain new changes, so the organization reacts but does not anticipate.
The tension between the two is not a problem to solve, but a dynamic to manage consciously.
- Foresight as a generator of questions, not answers: Scenarios are designed to open quality conversations, not to close them. They serve as strategic provocations.
- Sensemaking as a filter for Foresight: Not all scenarios are equally relevant, nor do all signals carry the same weight. Sensemaking allows you to prioritize signals, identify emerging patterns, and translate global trends into concrete, local impacts. The real value is created when the possible future becomes actionable meaning in the present.
3️⃣ A Curiosity About the Term
The term “foresight” began to gain traction in the corporate world thanks to Shell in the 1970s. Through scenario work, the company anticipated the 1973 oil crisis and reacted before many competitors. Since then, foresight is seen not as a theoretical exercise, but as a competitive advantage based on thinking ahead of others.
4️⃣ Practical Methodological Resources
- UK Government – “A brief guide to Futures thinking and foresight”: Introduction to systematic identification of trends, weak signals, and emerging disruptions, with training resources from the UK government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/futures-thinking-and-foresight-a-brief-guide/a-brief-guide-to-futures-thinking-and-foresight
- Trend and Megatrend Analysis (Expanded PESTLE): Framework for analyzing trends across Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental dimensions and their interactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEST_analysis
- Scenario Planning: Shell has been a reference in scenario development since the 1970s. https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-future/scenarios.html
- Backcasting: How to define a desired future and work backward to identify key decisions in the present. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backcasting
- Three Horizons Framework (H3): How to manage the present while building alternative futures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Horizons
5️⃣ Recommended Readings
- OECD – Strategic Foresight for Public Policy https://www.oecd.org/strategic-foresight/
- McKinsey – The case for strategic foresight https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-case-for-strategic-foresight
- World Economic Forum – Global Risks Report https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2025.pdf
6️⃣ Key Authors and References
- The recently created Spanish Foresight Association brings together key figures in Spanish foresight, such as Isabel de Salas, David Alayón, César Astudillo, Paco Jariego, Isabel Fernández-Peñuelas, Manuel Martínez Alonso, Maribel Vega, Pedro Enríquez de Salamanca, Cristina Vila, and many more. https://aeprospectiva.es/directorio-de-socios/
- Notable authors in English: Peter Schwartz – “The Art of the Long View” – Founder of the Global Business Network; Andy Hines & Peter Bishop – “Thinking about the Future”; Rafael Ramírez & Angela Wilkinson – “Strategic Reframing”; Amy Webb – Founder of the Future Today Institute
Alberto Terol 
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