For many organisations, September marks the time of year to start planning for the following year’s business goals and objectives. Data is gathered and analysed, and commitments are made to new priorities and budgets.
Traditional business planning activities include setting – or resetting – the direction of travel and the overarching vision and mission of the organisation. Revenues are forecast, budgets are set and cash flow projections are made. Typically, these are all based on historical data and assumptions.
People, budget and other resources are allocated to strategic priorities, and operational planning breaks down strategic goals into specific department or team-level plans with clear actions, timelines and responsibilities.
Performance and success measures are also agreed, together with review cycles that determine how regularly plans are reviewed and, as necessary, adapted.
Robust business planning exercises ought also to include market and SWOT analyses, but sadly often these are hurried cut-and-paste updates of last year’s reviews. In these turbulent times, how many people at work today have the luxury of taking a regular time-out to ponder the status and trajectory of their industry, vertical or competitors?
Why is traditional business planning no longer enough?
Even when conventional business planning activities are robust, the reality is that all too often they’re based on an assumption that the external world is stable and predictable. Which, of course, is no longer true.
In 2026, territorial and resource-based conflicts are abundant, creating pinch points in already fraught global supply chains. Trade frictions and tariff uncertainties challenge the availability of many goods and materials, and increasingly extreme weather events threaten human life, biodiversity and food supplies. Global inequality has never felt more pronounced, and across the board, fear, stress and anxiety are rife.
We can’t pretend things are ‘normal’ any more.
In such uncharted landscapes, having a regularly reviewed and updated risk register is now a business imperative. Being able to foresee and identify potential obstacles is key to longer-term operating resilience.
But how many businesses have a proven methodology for risk mitigation?
How can businesses plan for uncertain futures?
In turbulent operating environments, taking time to think about the future and how the business would respond to plausible risks both builds agile thinking and offers an opportunity to innovate and build competitive advantage.
This is where strategic foresight and scenario planning are invaluable.
But what are they and how do they help? Let’s unpack each in turn.
What is strategic foresight?
The OECD describes strategic foresight as “a structured and systematic approach of exploring plausible futures to anticipate and better prepare for change” [1]. It’s fast becoming an essential feature of business planning for any organisation that wants to stay both resilient in adverse operating conditions and ahead of its competition.
Strategic foresight helps organisations anticipate the external drivers causing operating disruption and pre-empt a broader range of market possibilities. As an exploratory exercise, it scans for signals, emerging trends and potential discontinuities across the wider operating environment. It is:
- Continuous and wide-ranging: It encompasses horizon-scanning, trend analysis, stakeholder interviews and expert panels.
- Assumption-challenging: It is deliberately expansive, exploring what could happen, including things outside current mental models and belief systems.
- Open-ended: It doesn’t offer firm conclusions. Instead, the goal is to develop curiosity, imagination and deeper awareness of what might be.
What is scenario planning?
Scenario planning is a complementary activity that takes the signals and uncertainties identified through foresight and distils them into three to four coherent, plausible alternative futures.
By weaving together narratives that diverge from the current operating landscape, it tests ‘what if’ strategies against specific alternative futures. It produces plans that improve market readiness and operating resilience. Scenario planning is:
- Targeted and decision-focused: ‘If A, B and C were to happen, how would our operating context change and what would this mean for our business and its stakeholders?’
- Narrative-based: Each scenario is an integrated story with flow and logic, based on imagining the impact of interwoven trends.
- Action-oriented: The goal is to pressure-test strategy, identify risks, expose blind spots and leverage market opportunities.
What’s the difference between strategic foresight and scenario planning?
Strategic foresight and scenario planning work best as two stages of the same process. Strategic foresight is the open-ended, ongoing work of scanning the wider environment for signals, trends and possible disruption. This helps broaden the lens of future possibilities.
Scenario planning then turns those findings into three to four clear, plausible futures, so leaders can test their strategy against each one and decide how to respond.
Why does situational awareness matter for organisations?
The pace of change today is breathtaking. Circumstances can change in a heartbeat, and now more than ever, organisations need all hands observing and responding to new operating contexts, as they arise.
Alongside running regular strategic foresight and scenario planning exercises, businesses should make sure all colleagues are trained and equipped to make sense of, and empowered to respond to, shifts in the external environment as they unfold. The military refers to this level of understanding as situational awareness, and it is widely recognised as a crucial combat skill.
A useful visual metaphor here is to think of internal stakeholders as sensory nodes in a network, taking information from the external environment and making sense of and responding to it in as close to real time as possible. This strengthens organisational agility and helps businesses become more resilient and adaptive.
Making time to run more frequent review cycles is valuable when it’s harder to predict what might lie ahead. Equipping all colleagues with the skills to make sense of what’s changing, why it’s changing and what it might mean for the organisational strategy is critical in turbulent operating environments. It moves risk assessment from a nice-to-have to a mission-critical exercise of monitoring for potential disruption and exposure.
All this points to the urgent need to update how business planning is undertaken.
What is the difference between deliberate and emergent strategy?
Deliberate strategy is the formal plan an organisation sets out to follow. Emergent strategy is what actually happens when the organisation responds to day-to-day challenges, as they arise. Harvard Business School has drawn this distinction [2] and it’s a useful lens for rethinking how business planning is done.
Deliberate strategy is the one most executives know best. It comes from thoughtful, organised action, based on detailed analysis of data, and it’s what the annual planning cycle is designed to produce.
By contrast, emergent strategy shows up in how organisations behave day to day. It’s made visible by what gets prioritised and where resources are allocated in response to shifting market conditions.
Most executive education programmes teach deliberate strategy, but far fewer address emergent strategy. Yet in today’s hyper-connected, globalised economy, unexpected disruption regularly derails even the most robust plans. Organisations that blend the two get both clarity of vision and the flexibility to adapt as market forces evolve.
How does internal communication affect strategy execution?
A strategy is only as effective as people’s understanding of it. Poorly communicated business plans and a lack of strategic alignment undermine morale, derail performance and erode workplace trust.
The 2026 IC Index [3], annual research undertaken by the Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC) in partnership with Ipsos Karian and Box, shows how fragile that trust has become: only half of the 5,000 employees surveyed trust their CEO or senior leaders.
This highlights the criticality of keeping all colleagues informed, regardless of how they’re employed or where they sit in the talent ecosystem. They all need to understand the business plan, however often it’s updated. More importantly, they must know the vital part they personally have to play in delivering it.
Where should businesses start?
Obviously, all this doesn’t come without its challenges. It’s incredibly hard to agree on a plan when there’s no guarantee it will deliver what’s needed to sustain business continuity and stability. It’s even harder to admit that mistakes have been made. It’s why humility and vulnerability are now cited as key leadership skills [4, 5].
There is, of course, a huge amount to digest here. But until we rethink and redesign how work is planned and organised, we’re only going to get diminishing results.
It’s time to start prioritising organisational resilience and agility. Organisations that don’t won’t survive the coming years. Strategic foresight and scenario planning are proven exercises that bake in sustainability and boost innovation.
It’s time to do things differently. Let’s start with business planning.
How Working the Future helps with strategic foresight and scenario planning
We help organisations understand how and where their legacy business practices are hindering wider performance.
Our work trend intelligence seminars help executive teams better understand the interplay between various forces that are creating complexity in today’s operating environments.
Our strategic foresight workshops offer leadership teams a structured way to think about the future and explore a wider range of plausible futures for improved risk mitigation and opportunity spotting.
Our scenario planning sessions help business leaders think more broadly and adaptively about long-term goals and objectives.
If you are committed to business future-proofing and sustainability, updating what you include in your annual planning activities is a vital first step.
Get in touch with Working the Future today.
References:
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/strategic-foresight.html
[2] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/emergent-vs-deliberate-strategy
[3] https://www.ioic.org.uk/insight-practice/ic-index.html
[4] Hess, E. & Ludwig, K. (2017). Humility is the New Smart: Rethinking human excellence in the smart machine age. Berrett-Koehler.
[5] https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability
+ + + + + + + +
Business transformation isn’t the latest software or project tool. Lasting organisational change happens conversation by conversation...
So, if you’d like to explore anything we've touched on in this blog or discuss any other aspects of the future of work, please do get in touch.
You might also want to: