foresights
The decisions leaders make today are shaped by what they understand about tomorrow. That's precisely why we built foresights—a dedicated space for sharing the ideas, trends, issues, and signals influencing the futures of leaders and their organisations.
Developing Blockchain Strategy.
You should read this if… you are a CEO or board member exploring whether and how blockchain could create value beyond hype and cryptocurrency. This article explains what blockchain is—and isn’t—and outlines the key considerations when developing a blockchain strategy that aligns with your organisation’s purpose, operating model, and risk appetite. It highlights the characteristics and benefits of blockchain (such as transparency, security, and distributed trust), contrasts public and private blockchains, and explores how decentralised approaches like DAOs could enable new models—including payment‑by‑outcomes contracting in the social sector—helping leaders make informed, strategic decisions about if, where, and when blockchain makes sense.
6 Principles of Business Growth.
You should read this if… you are running a business and looking for a grounded, long‑term view of how sustainable business growth actually happens. This article outlines six core principles of business growth—universality, scalability, replicability, gradualism, optionality, and flexibility—arguing that growth is not driven by shortcuts or one‑off wins, but by systems and choices that can endure and adapt over time. It shows how applying these principles helps leaders design growth strategies that remain resilient in the face of uncertainty, avoid over‑extension, and create the conditions for steady, repeatable progress rather than fragile, short‑term gains.
Strategic Foresight - a robust method for dealing with adaptive problems.
You should read this if… you are a CEO or board member grappling with change that cannot be solved through incremental fixes or existing expertise alone. This article explains why strategic foresight is a robust approach for addressing adaptive problems—challenges that require shifts in thinking, behaviour, and business models as the world changes. It shows how foresight helps leaders anticipate emerging change, distinguish adaptive from technical problems, and create the conditions for meaningful, long‑term adaptation rather than short‑term solutions. By applying strategic foresight, organisations can become more agile, better aligned with future operating contexts, and more capable of delivering sustained impact and growth amid ongoing uncertainty.
What is Futures Intelligence?
You should read this if… you are a CEO or board member who wants to strengthen decision‑making for impact and growth in a world where past data alone is no longer enough. This article explains what futures intelligence is and how it brings together trends, signals, and emerging change to support foresight‑informed decisions. It shows how futures intelligence helps leaders move from insight to action by making sense of uncertainty, exploring multiple plausible futures, and understanding how choices made today shape longer‑term outcomes. By embedding futures intelligence into decision‑making, organisations can act with greater confidence, align strategy with emerging realities, and intentionally design pathways to impact and future growth rather than reacting after change has already occurred.
Are Australian Charities Rich or Poor?
You should read this if… you are interested in an evidence-based view of whether Australia’s charity sector is building balance sheets or converting revenue into service delivery. This post uses publicly available ACNC data (covering over 49,000 charities, with annual datasets available back to 2013) to examine sector “wealth” and balance‑sheet health, and finds that most Australian charities raising revenue from the public in 2019 appeared financially healthy, with assets and liabilities broadly proportionate to sector revenue. It notes that charities holding land and property tend to have larger balance sheets and that property value increases—particularly in metropolitan areas—have supported balance‑sheet strength, while revenue growth did not appear to be disproportionately used to inflate balance sheets; it also argues that adding cashflow data to ACNC reporting would enable a more complete assessment
Managing the Risk of Innovation.
Innovation is a tricky beast. It's not always clear that the risks outweigh the rewards. For those of us in for-purpose organisations, getting the business case right to fund innovation is critical; uncertainty can be a roadblock, but it doesn't have to be.
Real Growth Takes Time.
Build a lasting future for your business with foresight-driven planning. Discover how tools, data, and aligned actions can help you stay agile and achieve long-term goals.
Foresight: helping us prepare for what might happen next.
At insight & foresight we define foresight as the skill of looking forward to preparing for what might happen next. This is not about predicting the future with but rather using proven foresight tools and skills to explore a range of plausible, possible, probable, and preferred futures so we can better understand what could happen and…