Active Foresight

When thinking about the future becomes a strategic act

We live in a paradoxical time

We live in a paradoxical time.

Never have companies had so much data, analysis, indicators and foresight studies, and never have they had so much difficulty thinking about the future.

The problem is not a lack of information. It lies elsewhere.

The future cannot be contained in tables, statistical extrapolations or five-year plans.

No statistic has ever made it possible to predict the future, not because of a lack of data, but because the future is never a simple extension of the past.

In an unstable, non-linear world, marked by disruptions, uncertainty and multiple interactions, wanting to predict the future is an illusion.

But giving up on thinking about it is a strategic mistake.

We are lacking the future

If the future is so difficult to think about today, it is not only because of a lack of methods.

It is because we are collectively lacking imagination to think about the future.

Our organisations remain trapped in powerful biases:

• projection of the past

• linear thinking

• excessive simplification

• inherited cultural frameworks that reduce our ability to imagine differently

Traditional strategic exercises such as PESTEL, benchmarks and medium-term plans produce a large amount of data, but rarely meaning, connection or narrative.

They structure the present. They reassure. But they leave little room for complexity, and even less room for the ability to glimpse possible futures.

This inability to project forward exhausts organisations. It feeds fear. And it locks companies into permanent reaction.

👉 Today, thinking about the future has become a strategic act.

The future is not predicted, it is explored

Thinking about the future does not mean saying what will happen.

It means:

• exploring what could happen

• confronting multiple possible futures

• giving space to creativity and imagination to create syntheses

• learning to decide in uncertainty

This is where the challenge lies.

It makes it possible to create something that has become rare:

an anticipation space.

An anticipation space to:

• take the time to go fast

• step out of immediacy

• reintroduce long-term thinking into an accelerated world

• keep one’s head above the surrounding noise

Foresight makes it possible to create this anticipation space, which gives time to understand, question, learn and reinvent.

Organisations do not fail because the world changes too fast, but because they no longer learn fast enough.

👉 In its essence, foresight restores this vital capacity for learning.

From theoretical foresight to active foresight

Faced with the complexity of the world, many organisations turn to foresight.

But too often, this foresight remains theoretical, top-down and disembodied.

Brilliant studies.

Interesting scenarios.

Reports that end up in drawers.

The problem is not intellectual quality. It is the absence of appropriation.

In an unstable world, foresight can no longer be a one-off, external analytical object.

It must become an internal capability, connected to the heart of the organisation.

This is what we at Activate Innovation call active foresight, at the heart of our approach to permanent transformation.

Active foresight is not another study. Nor is it an academic exercise.

It is:

• a strategic tool, the reference tool for thinking about the future

• a discipline of continuous learning

• integrated at the heart of the organisation

👉 To imagine, explore and build the future, and to decide and act in uncertainty.

Foresight is not an exercise in prediction.

It is a living discipline of continuous learning.

Creating a space of permanent anticipation

Active foresight makes it possible to create what organisations lack most today:

a space of permanent anticipation.

A space where one learns to:

• capture weak signals of the future and strong signals of the present

• connect them, interpret them and put them into perspective

• transform signals into questions

• questions into scenarios

• scenarios into exploration choices

Having an edge does not mean knowing before others.

It means learning before others.

👉 You may start humbly and progress every day, but you have already become difficult to catch up with. You have sustainably gained an edge.

Permanent transformation: exploit and explore

Companies have historically been built around a culture of exploitation:

• performance

• optimisation

• efficiency

• operational excellence

Our schools, tools and indicators are designed to improve what already exists.

This is essential. But it is no longer sufficient.

By constantly optimising what exists, we eventually stop seeing the world change around us.

Even worse, our culture tends to devalue exploration.

Imagining the future? Exploring? That is often considered not serious.

This is a major mistake.

👉 Being serious today means taking the future head-on, with the same rigour and demand as the exploitation of what already exists.

Every company faces a structuring tension:

• exploiting and developing what exists (horizons 1 and 2)

• exploring the world to come (horizon 3).

The role of the leader is not to choose. It is to hold this tension over time.

Active foresight is one of the major tools of exploration in permanent transformation.

DNA, vision and the collective project of the future

Thinking about the future does not mean becoming someone else.

On the contrary.

Active foresight is based on a strong conviction:

we only reinvent ourselves sustainably by remaining faithful to who we are.

Any serious approach begins by clarifying:

• where we come from: DNA, values, singularity

• where we want to go: the vision, the role we choose to play in the world to come.

Accepting that the world is changing, without denying ourselves.

The real lever is human.

What destroys the most energy in organisations is not change, but fear of the future.

👉 Putting the collective into a project of the future radically transforms dynamics:

• the future becomes a subject of dialogue

• imagination is released

• engagement is strengthened.

Vision becomes a shared project.

Everyone becomes an actor of the future.

Everyone becomes a source of vigilance for the organisation.

A strategic source of renewal

Active foresight then becomes a strategic source of renewal.

It allows the company to remain resolutely open to the outside world and pulled by the future.

It allows the company to constantly reinterpret itself without denying itself, and therefore to remain alive in a changing world.

We live in a time lacking the future.

Not because of a lack of data.

Nor because of a lack of analysis.

But because of a lack of imagination to think about the future.

Active foresight provides precisely what we lack today:

• a concrete framework to imagine the future

• to confront possible futures

• to create a space of permanent anticipation.

In a complex world, the future is not predicted.

It is imagined, explored and built, collectively.

👉 A company that knows how to imagine its future together becomes, sustainably, difficult to catch up with.