Closing the Foresight-Action Gap

Seeing the future isn’t the same as building it.

The first person I heard use “future” as a verb was probably Douglas Rushkoff. That would’ve been about 2018, and Rushkoff was already years into making the argument that a better future depended on having more people actively involved in exploring and shaping futures. He wanted to push us all out of passivity and into agency, into the belief that the future didn’t have to be something that happened to us. It could be something we would meaningfully and intentionally co-create.

I was working for Singularity University then, and Rushkoff’s framing definitely resonated with me. Among the many things we were up to at SU, bringing more people into big conversations about the future and how they could lead as if the future were theirs to create (or at least positively influence) felt like a personal mission. In some ways, it still does, but the conversation and the context have both changed.

In 2026, big conversations about the future seem to be everywhere. And many organizations and institutions now speak the language of futures and foresight. We wrote about this uptick a couple of months ago in an essay on the common failure modes in foresight work, and I want to dig a little deeper into one of those modes today because I think that for all of the talk about futuring, a disappointingly large share of foresight projects never reach the point of activating real agency. They lead from passivity to a slightly differentiated and better-informed passivity but never manage to close the insight-to-action gap, which is a shame because that’s where we find the real value. That’s where all the work (and all the frameworks) of foresight actually pays off.

As we wrote in June: Foresight that never connects to action is just an interesting exercise, and it’s one that will quickly lose buy-in. In a strategic setting, our capacity to envision and explore futures is only valuable to the extent that we can use it to inform and influence decision-making in the present. If we’re not closing what Bob Johansen described as a Foresight-Insight-Action loop, we’re not delivering value.

So how do we close the loop and get to specific actions that are, you know… actually actionable?

(1) Don’t be afraid to get granular with your futuring. Foresight work is more interesting – and more valuable – when it becomes more specific, when the futures envisioned feel tangible, real, and inhabited. High-level, generic scenarios and broad trends don’t have enough specificity to offer real traction when you get down to questions about organizational strategy. Generic foresight produces generic insight, so push harder. And yes, more detail means more likelihood of being “wrong” with some of the details, but remember: You’re not making a forecast. You’re creating a set of plausible futures with enough clarity that each suggests a reasonably defined strategic path. The value realized in moving from those insights to follow-on actions will ultimately come from looking across the futures and the corresponding strategies to identify no-regrets moves, smart bets, and key signals to monitor.

(2) Don’t let the limitations of today’s org crowd out tomorrow’s possibilities. Maybe you’ve heard the quip (often attributed to Fredric Jameson) about it being easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Turns out it’s also remarkably hard for some folks to envision a radically changed organization or core value proposition even when imagining a radically changed world as context. Readers of this newsletter might be familiar with the Killer Competitor workshop we use at radical to push leaders past their assumptions about what is/isn’t feasible for the org by asking them to design a hypothetical firm that would outcompete their own in a specific future. Scanning a set of such Killer Competitor orgs reliably sets up a conversation about what exactly makes these competitors so successful and what the existing, present organization would have to do to either become the competitor in each scenario or be capable of fending it off. Exploring this delta brings us into payoff territory.

(3) Never mistake a clear view for a short distance. Our buddy Paul Saffo used to say this all the time at Singularity. He was talking about timing forecasts, but the principle can apply just as well to foresight. Seeing the future – of the market, of the industry, of the organization – isn’t the same thing as being or building that future. To realize the value of foresight work and to actually unlock the agency it promises as an outcome, we have to get to action. We have to get into the experimentation that helps us better understand the path toward the future we envision (and the actual distance involved).

Coming out of the Killer Competitor module discussed above, you’re going to be looking at a set of possibilities to explore – capabilities or assets that could determine whether the organization thrives or flounders in the future. The next step is to pull these future capabilities closer to the present with a backcasting process to get all the way from the mature form you’ve envisioned as a key feature of the thriving org in, say, 2030 to a discrete experiment that you can carve out of your existing budget for the next quarter.

That experiment, which should be just one in a larger learning portfolio, is your ping – mapping the space of possibility and discovering the path forward. If you’re not pinging, you’re not taking the action to validate your foresight work, and you’re not developing the clarity that allows that work to advance and yield greater value over time as you move from assumptions to knowledge.

In other words, you’re still stuck in passivity – still gazing into the distance, just with a few more opinions about what the future might hold.

@Jeffrey