IQ Zone
You can wait but the future will not !
Why PROSPECTIVE (or FORESIGHT)?
• Futures LITERACY
According to the UNESCO (adapted) :
Futures Literacy is the skill that enables people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do. In our complex world, the global challenges we face require more inclusive and agile approaches to policy design and decision-making. Rooted in the discipline of anticipation, Futures Literacy can enhance our ability to shape policies and systems that withstand shocks and create long-term resilience. Futures Literacy helps people understand why and how we use the future to prepare, plan, and interact with the complexity and novelty of our societies.
Futures literacy enables individuals, government, for-profit, and non-profit organizations, and communities to better understand the role of the future in order to better anticipate it, adapt to change, and ultimately create a preferred future. It fosters resilience, innovation, and equity in an uncertain world. It helps businesses innovate, governments develop adaptive if not forward-thinking policies, educators prepare students for unfamiliar careers, and individuals develop the capacity to envision alternative futures. For regions and localities, it enables tailored responses to urgent challenges, sustainable development, and community co-creation. Combined with the mindset of antifragility, futures literacy transforms uncertainty into opportunity, ensuring that systems adapt, change, and thrive under pressure while building a better future.
• Prospective/Foresight
Why ?
Foresight is that continuous activity that allows organizations to explore possibilities, options, or alternative futures, articulate scenarios, study their impacts, and select the best or preferred future. It helps develop a “future” attitude.
Objectives
The practice of foresight has two broad specific objectives: (1) the anticipation of alternative futures and scenarios (2) the creation of a preferred future.
• Who ?
Foresight affects and interests all types of organizations, large, medium, or small, private or public, and includes national, provincial, or regional governments.
Foresight involves the participation of multiple teams and individuals within an organization:
- Senior management and directors (board of directors);
- Middle management and those responsible for innovation, strategy, and risk management.
These are the teams and individuals necessary for effective participatory foresight (participatory in discovering where and in whom the future we need is hidden, and who knows it without our knowledge).
• Future-readiness
In a world marked by complexity, instability, and accelerating change, being “future-ready” isn’t a slogan—it’s a strategic necessity. But what does this expression really mean?
We believe that future readiness has two complementary dimensions.
The first is the conceived future—the one we actively shape. This is the domain of foresight. It involves imagining desirable futures and guiding today’s decisions to achieve them. This approach is proactive, creative, and relies on openness to the external environment. This is what Daniel Kahneman would describe as stepping outside our mental frameworks to consider alternatives, sometimes radically better ones. This is how organizations ensure their long-term continuity.
The second is the received future—the one we anticipate without being able to control. This is the domain of risks, resilience, and adaptation. Here, preparation involves equipping the organization to react with agility in the face of uncertainty.
Being ready for the future therefore means both anticipating what’s coming and resisting what’s happening. The best-prepared organizations know how to do both.
• A CONTINUITY plan that includes the future
Au-delà du modèle traditionnel de continuité des affaires
Le modèle traditionnel de plan de continuité des affaires (PCA) vise à aider les organisations à survivre aux perturbations à court terme — qu’il s’agisse de catastrophes naturelles, d’attaques informatiques ou de ruptures d’approvisionnement — en assurant la reprise rapide des opérations critiques. C’est indispensable, mais ce n’est plus suffisant.
Dans un monde en mutation rapide, la continuité ne concerne pas uniquement la reprise : elle concerne la pertinence. Les marchés évoluent, les technologies progressent, les attentes des clients changent. Une entreprise qui survit à une crise mais ne s’adapte pas risque de devenir obsolète.
C’est pourquoi il faut élargir la définition de la continuité. En plus de la gestion de crise, les organisations ont besoin d’une continuité stratégique : la capacité de rester pertinentes et compétitives dans l’avenir.
Cela implique d’intégrer la prospective aux décisions, de surveiller les signaux faibles, d’explorer des futurs alternatifs et de renouveler les modèles d’affaires avant qu’ils ne s’épuisent. Il s’agit de se préparer aux transitions, et non seulement aux interruptions.
En d’autres termes : la résilience vous permet de rebondir ; la continuité stratégique vous permet d’avancer. Ce n’est pas seulement de la gestion des risques, c’est de la gestion de la pertinence.
En combinant pensée future et planification traditionnelle, les organisations passent de la survie au leadership. Dans un contexte de perturbation permanente, la capacité d’adaptation devient la meilleure forme de continuité.
• Impacts on performance
Profitability and Growth
A study by Rohrbeck and Kum on the impact of foresight on organizational performance concludes that: “So-called ‘future-ready’ companies, defined as those with a foresight practice, posted 33% higher profitability than the average company and 200% higher growth.”
Disappearances |
Due to a lack of anticipation and preparation, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, no fewer than 50 billion-dollar companies disappeared in the United States alone (McKinsey).
Kodak, Blackberry Motion, Motorola, Nokia, and Palm are well-known examples of the failure to innovate and adapt to the future, and of a delayed response.
Bankruptcies |
CB Insights reports that since 2015, 154 of the largest US retailers have filed for bankruptcy and asserts that Amazon isn’t the only reason brick-and-mortar retail is struggling: rising debt, retailer missteps, and a lack of adaptability are also to blame, among other factors.
• Strategy making
According to Henry Mintzberg, strategic planning is a step, and in fact the final one, in the process of strategy development. Developing a strategy involves the following three successive and iterative steps:
Strategic thinking: Researching and reflecting on all the elements and information necessary for decision-making or strategy selection.
Strategy development: This process is actually decision-making and involves senior management and delegated managers. It is based on the results of strategic thinking.
Strategy planning: A delegated task whose objective is to convert the selected strategy into a plan for its optimal execution, measurement, etc.
• Prospective is participative
Foresight provides an essential element in building a comprehensive strategy, namely that related to managing the uncertainty of the unknown future and the growing dynamics of rapid, discontinuous and interconnected changes.
Part of foresight or the forecasting of futures is done through the research of external events but also and above all by probing the future of a larger number of people which allows to discover unknown and surprising futures.
• Strategy is confidential
A misperception derived from the practice of participatory foresight is to think that this participatory practice also applies to strategy. If in the participatory perspective, we are missing who is not there (as many people as possible, for the greatest number of futures) in the stage of articulating the strategy, we wonder who is present or should be present.
• The future is proprietary
The involvement of third parties to properly analyze and discern the determinants, trends, and external signals that we call DONE FOR YOU PROSPECTIVE (DFYP) is a step that shortens your access to this type of information. That said, the future of an organization must be articulated by it and it alone; it is neither imposed nor copied and pasted.
• StrategIQ Asymetriy
The majority of futurists focus on developing the discipline of anticipation or foresight (invariably used here) and its teaching. Foresight as an academic discipline is well developed and when our interest and experience are more business-oriented, the first observation is to realize the strategic deficit created by the absence of information about the future (or futures) and also the deficit created by the lack of coherent integration of foresight into organizational activities and imperatives.
Four strategic challenges facing organizations today.
These challenges aren’t theoretical. They’re operational, cultural, and strategic. They affect organizations across all sectors and dimensions, including those tasked with advising others. This is why foresight is no longer a specialty: it’s becoming a shared responsibility. Those who recognize it early will quietly gain advances and develop advantages that may become difficult to regain.
(1) Structural pressures on performance and relevance
Businesses are still organized around stability, but operate under conditions that reward adaptability. Legacy structures, success metrics, and even internal cultures often reflect a world that has already changed.
Planning cycles assume continuity. Systems prioritize predictability over learning. Performance is optimized for yesterday’s situation.
What happens when the foundations of certainty are the very ones that create uncertainty?
(2) Market evolution and competitive reframing
The lines between industries are blurring. New competitors aren’t always “better”; they simply differentiate themselves in ways that matter today.
Platforms are redefining service delivery. AI is accelerating understanding, but eroding exclusivity.
Customers expect more than expertise: they expect perspective.
In a redefined landscape, is technical excellence enough to stay in the game?
(3) Cognitive and strategic blind spots
Most organizations aren’t blind; they’re too focused. They see what they’re trained to see… and miss what doesn’t.
Assumptions become truths.
Uncertainty is managed by ignoring it. Strategy becomes a timetable, not a compass.
Are we asking the right questions, or just the ones we’re familiar with?
(4) New threats are not clearly announced
They arise as much from the divergence of the known as from the convergence of the new, from contradiction and complexity.
Disruptions are no longer merely external: they are intricate, intertwined. Risk is everywhere, in what we do and don’t do, both internally and externally. The problem is not the unknown, but waiting, delay, and unpreparedness.
When the future doesn’t behave like the present, who helps organizations remain stable and progress?
About INNOVATION
• The innovation matrix
The 4 types of innovation
The four types of innovation can be grouped under the Innovation Matrix, which divides innovation into four categories: architectural innovation, incremental or incremental innovation, disruptive innovation, and radical innovation. These categories can apply to product innovation, marketing innovation, technological innovation, or process innovation:
Architectural innovation refers to the use of existing technologies to create new products or services in order to develop new markets and/or new consumers who have never purchased the product or service before. For example, technologies used for ride-sharing, including geolocation, are applied to taxi services.
Incremental innovation refers to a series of small-scale improvements to an existing product or service to add or maintain value.
Disruptive innovation is an idea that improves an existing market by exceeding the needs of a specific customer base, ultimately supplanting the existing market.
Radical innovation destroys the current market and value network, creating a completely new one.
• Business Model Innovation
Business Model Innovation (BMI) is, in short, how an organization innovates. It is the process by which it questions and changes the way it creates, delivers, and captures value.
It involves fundamentally rethinking key components of a business to gain a competitive advantage and/or advancement, rather than simply improving existing products or processes.
This often involves adjusting the value proposition to customers, changing the operating model, or both.