For years I have been working with executive boards and decision-makers. Through Covid, a war in Europe, the energy crisis, inflation, and shattered supply chains. Amid all these upheavals, I have experienced one thing again and again: leadership no longer takes place under stable conditions, but under permanent uncertainty.
In recent months, I have conducted many of these conversations even more consciously. I asked: What is really preoccupying you right now?
The answers are astonishingly similar.
When proven business models no longer hold
Many business models – especially in our European flagship industries – are beginning to wobble. For decades, it was enough to continuously optimize existing products, processes, and structures. Efficiency was the growth driver.
The last few years, however, have shown: that is no longer enough. Optimization alone creates no new growth when markets, technologies, and geopolitical conditions shift simultaneously.
Growth does not arise in the obvious business fields, because these are heavily contested and therefore hardly profitable. The blue oceans of the future, by contrast, are not (yet) apparent at first glance – and are thus often associated with high risk. The truly effective levers therefore frequently lie precisely where uncertainty reigns – and thus also fear.
To seize these opportunities, companies must learn to break away from pure process and optimization thinking and to think more radically again. This is not a purely strategic task, but also a cultural one. The step from maximum safeguarding toward consciously taken risk is difficult, especially for organizations that have been optimized for stability for decades.
This is exactly where futures thinking comes in: as a structured space for thinking and decision-making for radical innovation.
When not deciding becomes the greatest danger
At the same time, I am experiencing a second thing, almost even more urgent: making decisions is becoming ever more difficult.
The world is not only complex, but highly volatile. Developments do not proceed linearly, forecasts quickly lose their validity. The costs of a wrong decision have risen massively – financially, politically, culturally. In many industries, a great deal is at stake, often the economic substance itself.
The consequence: things are postponed, put on hold, analyzed further. Better to make no decision than the wrong one. But that is precisely what is fatal in a time when other players have long been trying to gain sovereignty over our economic and technological future.
Scenario work comes in at exactly this point. It creates no certainty in the classic sense, but orientation. It helps to systematically think through possible futures, to weigh options against one another, and to make decisions not from the gut, but out of an expanded understanding of the future.
Why I want to do my part
The founding of the Futurewise Company arose from precisely these observations.
I want to do my part to help European companies become capable of action again, not despite uncertainty, but with it.
My goal is to understand resilience not merely defensively, but as the foundation for new growth. Not as a retreat to what has proven itself, but as a conscious opening toward new futures. Toward business models that will still hold in five, ten, or fifteen years.
Futurewise supports leadership teams in opening up exactly these spaces: for radical thinking, for well-founded decisions, and for an economy that once again shapes its own future.
Yours,
Carina Stöttner
