Building resilience in corporate decision-making: The case for sustainability foresight

What is foresight (and what it is not….)?

For many, the term foresight conjures up images of prediction, a belief that with enough data and expertise, the future can be forecast with precision. Others dismiss it as abstract speculation, an indulgent exercise in “what-if” thinking that distracts from immediate priorities. Both views are misleading.

At its core, foresight is about recognising the plurality of futures. It accepts that the future cannot be known in advance yet insists it can be systematically explored. Through tools such as horizon scanning, trend analysis and scenario planning, foresight helps organisations map out multiple plausible trajectories and consider the implications of each. The goal is not accuracy but preparedness, developing strategies that remain resilient across uncertainty.

This distinction is crucial. Forecasting and foresight serve different purposes. Forecasting projects existing trends forward, assigning probabilities to expected outcomes. It assumes continuity and, in stable environments, it can be useful. Foresight, by contrast, assumes discontinuity. It is concerned with structural breaks, weak signals and low-probability but high-impact shifts.

Sustainability, especially in the current volatile climate, demands foresight. Unlike quarterly earnings or annual operations, the timescales of climate and ecological systems extend across decades. The risks are non-linear, the dependencies systemic and the consequences often irreversible. For companies, this means decisions taken today on infrastructure, resource dependency and supply chains have implications that stretch far beyond conventional planning horizons.

Foresight provides a way to grapple with this reality. It reframes sustainability strategy not as a compliance exercise or a linear pathway, but as a process of navigating multiple futures. Foresight, in a sense, is less about prediction than about humility, an acceptance that the future will surprise us and that resilience requires preparation for the unexpected.

Applying foresight to sustainability strategy

The sustainability transition is often portrayed as a linear journey of an upward trajectory of ambition, policy and technology adoption leading to a decarbonised, nature-positive future. Reality is far messier as we now are beginning to realise. The sustainability landscape is a domain of uncertainty, marked by volatility across multiple dimensions.

Uncertainty extends well beyond climate. Biodiversity loss manifests in fragmented ways from water scarcity to species decline. At the same time, resource security is under strain as concentrated supply chains face disruption from nationalism and trade disputes, while shifting social expectations and litigation raise the bar for corporate accountability. What was acceptable yesterday can become untenable overnight.

Taken together, these dynamics reveal sustainability not as a steady transition curve but as a contested space where futures diverge sharply. One path leads to rapid policy acceleration, another to fragmentation and delay both credible, both disruptive. The challenge for companies is not to predict which will prevail, but to build strategies resilient across them. That is the discipline foresight enables.

Foresight methods are often presented as abstract exercises. In reality, they are practical tools for stress-testing strategy in volatile environments. In practice, applying foresight means interrogating the hidden assumptions that underpin strategy. Foresight forces companies to confront discontinuities, stress-test their plans against them and prepare for resilience rather than betting everything on continuity.

In practice, applying foresight means interrogating the hidden assumptions that underpin strategy. Many companies assume biodiversity loss will remain an externality but what if liability law suddenly makes firms financially accountable for ecosystem damage? The same applies to resources. Supply chains are often planned on the basis of stable globalisation yet what if geopolitical fragmentation restricts access to critical minerals such as lithium or copper? Food systems are assumed to be resilient but what if extreme weather events trigger cascading shortages and price volatility across multiple markets? Even technological optimism carries risk with many firms banking on cheap renewable energy or breakthrough storage, but what if deployment stalls due to resource scarcity or trade restrictions?

These are not remote or speculative scenarios. Each is plausible within the coming decade, and each has the power to strand strategies that appear robust under linear assumptions. Foresight forces companies to confront these discontinuities, stress-test their plans against them and prepare for resilience rather than betting everything on continuity.

The value of risk-focused futures thinking

Why should companies invest in foresight? Because the cost of vulnerability coupled with oversight is far greater than the cost of preparation. Sustainability is no longer a field of incremental change but is now a landscape of structural uncertainty one in which foresight is not a peripheral exercise but integral to risk governance.

1. Avoiding over and under preparation

Companies, in the current climate, are in a double bind. Without foresight, they risk over-preparing for futures that may never materialise or under-preparing for those that do. Both are costly.

Over-preparation wastes capital. Companies may invest heavily in compliance structures or supply chains tailored to one anticipated policy trajectory only to find that political will collapses, timelines are extended or regulations are diluted. The resources committed are then sunk, delivering no competitive return.

On the other hand, under-preparation exposes companies to existential threats. Firms that assume continuity are blindsided when abrupt policy acceleration or litigation occur. By the time they respond, capital is stranded, market share eroded or reputations irreparably damaged.

Foresight helps strike a balance. By rehearsing multiple plausible futures, leaders can identify where investment is robust across scenarios and where it represents a high-stakes bet on a single outcome. The value lies in distinguishing between what is contingent and what is inevitable between the noise of transient policy debate and the deeper structural shifts that no company can avoid.

2. Reducing exposure to stranded strategies

The notion of stranded assets is now widely understood. Less visible, but equally dangerous, are stranded strategies. These are growth plans, product portfolio or capital investments built on assumptions that unravel under alternative futures. For example, a global supply chain strategy may become stranded in a future of geopolitical fragmentation or an incremental decarbonisation pathway may become stranded when abrupt policy tightening demands radical transformation within a single investment cycle.

Unlike assets, strategies do not sit visibly on balance sheets. Their obsolescence is revealed only when performance falters. Foresight reduces this risk by surfacing the assumptions behind strategies and testing them against discontinuity. It asks under which futures does this strategy fail and what alternatives remain viable across them all?

3. Seeing systemic risks before they cascade

Traditional risk management operates by cataloguing discrete risks such as regulatory non-compliance, supply disruption or reputational harm. What it struggles to capture are systemic risks i.e. those that cut across domains, amplify each other and trigger cascading consequences. For example, a drought (environmental) reduces water supply, which disrupts agriculture (economic), fuels food price inflation (social) and provokes policy intervention (political). A sudden carbon price hike (political) destabilises energy markets (economic), accelerates demand for substitutes (technological) and exposes firms to litigation (legal).

These are not separate risks but interconnected dynamics. Foresight is uniquely suited to identify such linkages, because it looks not at isolated probabilities but at how different futures interact. By mapping interdependencies, it surfaces risks that would remain invisible on a conventional risk register.

4. From risk management to strategic navigation

The ultimate value of foresight lies not only in protecting firms from downside risk but in shifting the mindset of leadership. Risk management asks what could go wrong and how do we mitigate it? Foresight asks what if the world itself changes in ways we did not assume and how do we remain resilient?

This distinction matters. Risk management preserves continuity whereas foresight prepares for discontinuity. Risk management treats uncertainty as an aberration to be controlled whilst foresight treats it as the condition of doing business in the 21st century.

In sustainability, where uncertainty is structural, foresight is not a speculative add-on but ensures that strategies remain viable not only under the future we hope for but under the futures we cannot avoid.

Moving forward – Preparing for continued volatility

Senior management may resist foresight because it unsettles familiar ways of thinking. Myths persist such as that foresight is about prediction, when in fact it is the opposite, in that it is preparation for uncertainty and that it slows decision-making, when in practice it accelerates it by clarifying vulnerabilities.

Organisational barriers reinforce these myths. Certainty is prized over ambiguity. To acknowledge uncertainty is often seen as a weakness. In this environment, foresight risks being reduced to theatre, a one-off workshop that inspires briefly but leaves no lasting impact on governance or strategy.

The greater danger, however, lies not in misusing foresight but in neglecting it. As we have seen, the sustainability landscape is volatile, fragmented, and increasingly shaped by discontinuities. The same can be said about other areas, such as digitalisation and AI to name one. Conventional tools in the form of compliance, forecasting and risk registers struggles to capture these dynamics.

Foresight does not eliminate uncertainty, but it prevents oversight and identifies blind spots. It enables leaders to stress-test strategies, anticipate shocks and build resilience under multiple plausible futures.