This month, Jennifer Lo, Senior Director of Design Futures at IDEO, invites senior sustainability and impact leaders to imagine the future in detail as a way to strengthen their strategic choices in a period of sustained uncertainty.
What does it mean to lead responsibly when the forces reshaping your industry move faster than your planning cycles?
Executives are making long-term bets while technology reshapes industries, climate pressure reorders supply chains, political realignment redraws alliances, and affordability concerns shift consumer expectations and erode public trust. The question isn’t whether to respond, but how to do so.
In this environment, reacting quickly does not equal thinking clearly.
Instead of driving toward certainty, futuring strengthens a leader’s capacity to make sound decisions in periods of rapid change and ambiguity.
Jennifer Lo describes the discipline succinctly:
“Futuring does not predict. Instead, it’s about imagining multiple plausible futures so that organizations can capture opportunities and prepare for risk.”
Prediction assumes a single trajectory. Futuring expands the aperture. It pushes leaders to test their strategies against several possible worlds, not just the one they expect to unfold.
Jennifer begins with disciplined curiosity.
“Signals are early signs of change — small shifts that might point to something bigger. The key is to build a habit of noticing them and asking what they might mean.”
This habit reshapes leadership posture. Leaders scan at the margins. They track weak signals across technology, culture, policy, and markets. Over time, those signals form patterns that inform scenario thinking.
“Scenarios aren’t about getting the future right. They’re about stretching your thinking. When you imagine different plausible futures, you surface assumptions you didn’t realize you were making.”
Surfacing assumptions is strategic work. Many organizations base major decisions on inherited beliefs about stability, growth, stakeholder behavior, or technological pace. Futuring exposes those beliefs and invites scrutiny.
Jennifer also emphasizes tangibility.
“Success comes from making the future tangible and human. When people can picture it — even in small ways — they engage differently.”
When leaders imagine a future headline, sketch how a customer’s daily life might shift, or map how a regulatory change could cascade through operations, the future becomes concrete. Strategy conversations gain rigor.
Underlying all of this is a mindset shift.
“A future-ready mindset embraces uncertainty as a resource to be explored rather than a threat to be minimized.”
Corporate strategy often aims to reduce volatility. Futuring strengthens leaders’ ability to move through volatility with intention. It helps them identify no-regret moves, stress-test major investments, and recognize early signals before risks compound.
As Jennifer notes:
“You can’t measure the return on something that didn’t happen. But when organizations see disruption coming and pivot earlier, that’s where futuring proves its worth.”
Compounding disruptions and second-order effects now define the operating environment. Foresight does not eliminate uncertainty. It sharpens judgment. It expands imagination. It builds the resilience leaders need to act before reaction turns into crisis.
From March 18 to April 15, Jennifer Lo is leading a three-session Futuring Studio for members of the Business & Society community. Participants will learn core foresight methods, apply them to a real strategic question inside their organization, and build practical capacity to navigate uncertainty with greater confidence. Express interest here.
For in-depth answers to all your questions, check out Jennifer Lo’s blog post Your futuring questions, answered (which served as fodder for this post) or listen to her podcast episode How to Think Like a Futurist.
