Future-ready leadership is no longer optional

Most leaders operate in two time horizons: today, reacting to what happens, and tomorrow, thinking about this and next year’s budget.

But what about the third horizon, the future 5–10 years ahead?

That third horizon is the focus of this column. Because something is changing. Methods developed in futures studies over the last 50 years are gaining momentum in business. The foresight community is expanding, companies are increasingly using foresight tools, dedicated capabilities are emerging in-house, and more business schools are introducing futures and foresight programs. And still, it is early days. A recent study of 400 senior executives from Forbes Global 2000 companies found that 14% scan the horizon and plan more than five years ahead.

Why the approach to the future matters 

This is where the distinction between responsive and anticipatory leadership comes into play.

Responsive leaders focus on events, challenges and opportunities as they emerge. Anticipatory leaders look further ahead. They examine emerging signals, challenge assumptions and explore developments before they become today's reality.

Anticipatory leadership is not about living in the future. It is about using a systematic view of the future to shape decisions and actions today.

Three forces explain why this matters.

The first is the world around us.

It is becoming increasingly uncertain, more complex and ever faster changing. More forces of change are at play, their interdependencies are growing, and the speed at which they unfold keeps accelerating.

When I first worked with the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies in 2005, it identified ten megatrends and spoke about accelerating change. Today, it identifies fifteen and argues that the world is changing faster than organisations can. If so, reacting is no longer enough. Anticipation becomes essential.

The second is about data.

AI is giving businesses extraordinary capabilities to access and analyse information. But it is giving those capabilities to competitors too.

When everyone has access to increasingly similar information and analytical power, data becomes less of a differentiator. What counts is what we make of it: which signals we connect, which assumptions we question and what they mean for what comes next.

But data has another limitation: 100% of factual data are about the past. Future data, such as forecasts and predictions, are not facts. Working with the future means working with uncertainty. That gap has to be filled by contextual human judgement.

And the third is about AI itself.

AI can analyze trends, identify patterns, calculate probabilities and make predictions. But when we move from understanding the past to imagining the future, something changes.

Purpose, context, judgement, intuition, values, lived experience and imagination enter the picture. This is human sensemaking.

The more AI becomes part of decision-making, the more valuable our ability to imagine what does not yet exist will become.

Royal Pop: A great example of anticipatory leadership

Royal Pop offers a fascinating example.

The Swatch × Audemars Piguet collaboration transformed one of the most recognizable designs in luxury watches into an accessible, playful mass-market product. It is hard to imagine that an algorithmic extrapolation of existing trends would naturally lead to such an idea.

Before the launch, only the name “Royal Pop” was revealed. Speculation followed around the world. Yet virtually nobody anticipated what the product would be.

Then it landed.

Within one week, Royal Pop generated 6.5 billion impressions on social media, with people queuing outside Swatch stores around the world By any measure, an extraordinary product launch.

The interesting part is the assumption it challenged. Luxury has traditionally been built around exclusivity. Making an iconic design accessible to people with smaller budgets could therefore seem like precisely the wrong thing to do. Royal Pop was based on the opposite idea.

Nobody had data proving that Royal Pop would work. Someone had to challenge an established truth, imagine another possibility and act on it. Swatch CEO Nick Hayek himself makes an interesting distinction between AI and the future: “AI is a statistical system that tells you everything that was but is not looking into the future.”

That is anticipatory leadership in practice.

How to work with a future that has no facts?

This is where Strategic Foresight comes in.

Strategic Foresight is a discipline from futures studies that provides systematic methods to make better decisions today. Rather than forecasting one expected future, it explores several plausible ones, embracing uncertainty and opening up a wider range of possibilities.

The process starts with the forces shaping what comes next: broad megatrends, more specific industry and market trends, and developments directly relevant to the organisation. Leaders explore how these might develop and interact, identify critical uncertainties and create plausible scenarios.

Then comes the question that matters: What do these possible futures mean for the decisions we are making today?

In my experience, foresight dramatically improves the quality of strategies, plans and investment decisions. It can be a game changer. What looks convincing in one possible future may look much less so in another. New opportunities appear. Established assumptions suddenly look less certain.

Foresight is not about getting the future right. It is to make better decisions today, while there is still time to shape what happens next.

The future is already here

The future is not a distant destination waiting to arrive. It is already shaping today's decisions, investments and competitive landscape.

Leadership will always involve responding to what happens today. And there will always be next year's budget. But those first two horizons are no longer enough.

The third asks leaders to explore what could happen and let those insights shape what they do today. That is why future-ready leadership is no longer optional.

Leadership will increasingly be judged not by how effectively organisations respond to change, but by how well they prepare for what is coming.