The nature of change has changed. It is faster, more volatile, more complex and more uncertain than ever. How does a leader deal with this new normal? As the author states:
Enter today’s leader, an individual with an even greater need to grasp the nature and impact of change than all of those amazing women and men who made their mark on history. … In many ways, today’s leader has no precedent or benchmark for the skills that will help them succeed. … The most important leadership skill is therefore the ability to effectively manage, harness and leverage the constant change around us — and this can be done through foresight.
Richard Slaughter has defined ‘foresight’ (also known as futures thinking or futuring) as “the ability to create and maintain a high-quality, coherent and functional forward view, and to use the insights arising in useful organizational ways”. As a new core competency, foresight can provide a competitive advantage to those companies who use it to ‘navigate our uncertain and changing world with purpose’.
While this article offers few specifics about how to develop a foresight capability, it does serve as a useful resource to introduce the idea that this is something your company should at least investigate and experiment with.