Strategic foresight that’s grounded, disciplined and built for action

By Dr Marc Levy

Right Thinking

Strategic foresight is having a moment. Across sectors, leaders are scanning the horizon for signals of disruption, commissioning trend reports and running scenario workshops. That’s understandable: disruption cycles are shortening, risks are increasingly interconnected, and long-held assumptions are being tested more often.

But foresight only earns its keep when it changes decisions, when it sharpens strategy, informs posture and strengthens an organisation’s ability to deliver on its purpose in a shifting world. Too often, scanning becomes a catalogue of trends or a list of things to watch, disconnected from the choices leaders need to make. The result is familiar: interesting insights, unclear implications.

At Right Lane Consulting, we treat horizon and environmental scanning as a discipline of organisational sense-making. Our objective is to help clients build a structured, repeatable approach to identifying, interpreting and prioritising external drivers of change, so they can be as prepared as possible for trends and events that might shape their futures. This article outlines the perspective we bring to foresight projects and how we make scanning a source of actionable intelligence.

Why scanning matters now

Every organisation operates within a wider system: social, economic, political, technological, environmental and market forces that shape what is possible. Those forces interact, and sometimes shift quickly. Policy and regulatory settings change the rules of the game, evolving stakeholder expectations shift priorities, new technologies reorder industries, and climate risk is testing the future viability of places and economies.

In this context, strategy can’t be fixed. It must be a living response to a dynamic environment. Strong organisations anticipate change early, make sense of what it means for them, adjust posture before risks bite or opportunities pass, and stay anchored in what they exist to deliver.

Strategic foresight supports this. It builds a forward-looking evidence base, helps leaders see around corners and creates the confidence to move before it’s too late. It is not a prediction: the future is of course complex and uncertain. The point is to widen what leaders consider plausible and to prepare them to respond with intent.

Our framing: scanning as organisational sense-making

Scanning is a family of activities with different purposes, so clarity about what each contributes matters. They may frequently be used interchangeably; but are not synonymous.

Our framing rests on 3 interrelated disciplines:

1. Environmental scanning — identifying and monitoring trends and drivers of change in the external environment.
2. Horizon scanning — spotting early signals and potential discontinuities that are not yet widely recognised.
3. Strategic foresight — integrating these insights into coherent views of alternative futures and their strategic implications.

Together, these disciplines provide structure. Environmental scanning gives visibility on known forces. Horizon scanning focuses attention on emerging shifts at the edges. Strategic foresight connects both to strategic meaning and action.

The relevant academic literature informs our practice (for example, Choo, 2001; Hiltunen, 2006, 2008; Ramirez & Wilkinson, 2016; Voros, 2005; Weick, 1995). Taken together, this work reframes scanning not as the passive accumulation of information, but as an active capability, a connected chain that links sense-making, analysis and strategic decision-making.

Other key themes include:

• Privileging interpretation and meaning over the indiscriminate accumulation of information.
• Building organisational capacity to interpret ambiguous cues and anticipate their potential implications.
• Treating outward-looking attention as a sustained organisational capability rather than a one-off task.
• Distinguishing among different kinds of signals, including stable trends, weak signals of emerging change, and genuine wildcards – events with no clear precursors.
• Applying scenario planning disciplines to reframe strategic contexts, test underlying assumptions, explore options, and design moves that are robust across alternative futures.
• Being conscious of limitations regarding what we can really recognise, analyse and know, and the extent to which we are prepared to lean in to acquire the knowledge needed.

Our objective: bring a deeper understanding of what’s changing and what it means for our clients  

Our objective in foresight work is to establish a structured and disciplined approach that identifies, interprets and prioritises external drivers of change so they inform strategy, risk appetite and organisational posture. The goal isn’t to produce a list of trends; it’s to clarify:

• what forces are most likely to shape the organisation’s ability to deliver on purpose
  and ambitions
• which of these are most material, and why
• what do they imply for what an organisation could and should do
• what should be acted on now, monitored
  or prepared for.
• This is where conviction and flexibility meet. Conviction comes from clarity about purpose and mandate. Flexibility comes from an honest reading of the environment and a willingness to adapt posture as signals strengthen.

Our process: from broad scanning to actionable intelligence

Each project is tailored, but we follow a consistent logic that moves from breadth to focus and from insight to action.

1. Establish the mandate and scanning frame

We start by grounding the work in context: strategy horizon, operating environment and current uncertainties. We clarify the decisions scanning should inform, the system boundary, and how the work connects to existing strategy and risk processes.

2. Build the broad view: environmental scanning

We develop a structured picture of external drivers across relevant domains (social, technological, economic, environmental, political, market), using a systems lens rather than silos. We focus on forces with plausible pathways to impact on purpose, strategy or operating model, and/or the broader stakeholders environment, avoiding a ‘trend-dump’ in favour of materiality.

3. Look to the edges: horizon scanning

We then search for early indicators and less obvious shifts, weak signals and potential discontinuities that could reconfigure the environment over time. This includes emerging technologies or business models, early policy experiments, shifting community expectations, geopolitical or scientific inflection points and innovations from adjacent sectors. The aim is
to widen the space of possibility and notice what might otherwise be missed.

4. Interpret and cluster

We work with clients to test plausibility and cluster related drivers. We focus on interactions between forces to observe systematic effects, feedback loops and potential tipping points, shifting the work from ‘what’s happening?’ to ‘what patterns of change could shape our world?’ The ground is most fertile here, where uncertainty is highest, where multiple forces interact, assumptions can be fragile, surprises are more likely and small differences in interpretation can lead to profoundly different paths.

5. Prioritise materiality

Using a framework centred on alignment to relevance, potential impact and uncertainty, we narrow to a manageable set of priority forces for deeper investigation. This keeps attention on what is strategically material, not just interesting.

6. Translate to strategy and posture

We turn priorities into implications for direction and posture: what this means for strategic choices, risk appetite and capability investment, along with indicators that should trigger action. 

Where useful, we explore scenarios built around key uncertainties as a disciplined way to test robustness.

Our design principles

Foresight work must balance rigour with practicality. We use a set of design principles
to guard against common pitfalls:

1. Tailored to the mandate. The approach is custom-built to support specific decisions and the required timeframes.
2. Future-oriented. We look beyond what’s impacting now to plausible trajectories.
3. Selective and disciplined. Clarity and relevance beat exhaustive coverage.
4. Coherent narrative. Insights are connected into a story about what matters and why.
5. Designed for impact. Outputs are compelling tools for decision-making, not dull inventories of trends. 
6. Built for implementation. Translation into strategy and action is designed in from
   the outset.

These principles keep scanning grounded in the reality of leadership choices: they help organisations interpret external change in ways that ballast purpose and sharpen readiness for what comes next.

Note: The reflections in this article come from working alongside clients on hundreds of environmental analyses and many scenario planning exercises, always with a focus on translating trends and forces into insights that support strategic decision making. The drafting process was supported by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

If you would like to discuss this article or find out more, get in touch today.