Ideas from our foresight work with executives that every leader should know
When we think about the future, our attention goes forward almost automatically: to trends, scenarios, risks and opportunities. But one of the most underrated questions in strategic leadership isn’t what comes next?
It’s this:
What would we have decided differently in the past?
I have little time for simply extending past developments in a straight line into the future. But questioning past decisions — even playing out alternative pasts in your head — is a remarkably effective instrument for making better decisions tomorrow.
Two methods I use regularly in my work with leadership teams:
1. Counterfactual thinking: what if we had decided differently?
Picture a city that handed its best city-center locations to large shopping centers and international chains in the 2010s: H&M, Zara, the usual names.
At the time it looked sensible. Big brands were considered safe. They brought footfall, spending power and reliable tax revenue.
Ten years on, the city center is hollowed out. E-commerce has eaten away at a lot of those store models. Rents stayed high. The cafés, independent shops and local concepts that make a city center feel alive never had a real chance.
The underlying assumption back then was:
large chains are resilient. They draw people in. They’re the future.
But what if the city had decided differently? What could it have done instead, and what would the consequences have been?
That’s where counterfactual thinking earns its keep. The method doesn’t only show what went wrong. It exposes which assumption made the decision feel obvious at the time.
And that’s what makes it strategically relevant today:
Which of our current certainties will look like that empty shopping center in ten years?
2. The pre-mortem: how did it fail?
The second approach is the pre-mortem.
A city is planning its first big marathon. Before any decisions are final, the team asks an unusual question:
Imagine it’s the evening after the event — and it was a failure. What happened?
Suddenly the answers start arriving:
- Not enough medical staff along the route
- Road closures were never communicated to residents
- Aid stations were in the wrong places
- The start clashed with another major event
None of it was in the original plan. All of it could be fixed in time.
The pre-mortem shifts the perspective. Instead of asking abstractly could this fail?, it asks something more concrete and more useful:
How did it fail?
Imagining failure in advance makes it far more likely you’ll spot the real risks early — before they get expensive.
Why these methods matter for leaders
Strategic work involves a lot of looking forward: market shifts, technological developments, geopolitical scenarios.
But some of the clearest thinking about the future comes from an honest — or hypothetical — look backwards.
Because that’s where you see:
- which assumptions you’d been treating as facts
- which risks you systematically underestimated
- which thinking errors you may well be repeating right now
Being ready for the future isn’t only about looking ahead. It’s also about examining your own certainties.