You should read this if… you want to move beyond reacting to disruption and start actively shaping future impact and growth. This article explains what it means to think like a futurist, showing how foresight helps leaders make sense of uncertainty by exploring trends, imagining multiple possible futures, and understanding how today’s decisions influence what comes next. Rather than predicting outcomes, it demonstrates how futures intelligence gives leaders greater agency—helping them minimise downside risk, spot emerging opportunities, and take informed action over a practical five‑to‑ten‑year horizon so growth and impact are designed, not left to chance.

You should read this if… you are building the case for investing time and resources in futures thinking rather than relying solely on historical data and short‑term forecasts. This article sets out the business case for foresight, explaining why traditional data‑driven planning becomes unreliable in fast‑changing, uncertain environments. It shows how foresight complements existing analytics by exploring multiple possible, probable, and preferable futures, helping leaders make decisions with greater confidence, creativity, and reliability. By strengthening strategic agility, alignment, and the ability to shape rather than simply react to change, foresight becomes a practical capability for navigating uncertainty and supporting better long‑term outcomes.

Foresight is the ability to see beyond the present and into the future, and when used correctly, it can provide several benefits. So if you're looking for a way to boost your organisation's performance, foresight may be just what you need. In this post, we'll explore five benefits of using foresight in business. Keep reading to learn more!

In today's rapidly changing world, it is more important than ever to be able to manage uncertainty and fast-paced change. Many organisations struggle with this, but there are ways to manage it effectively. Here are 10 tips to help you get started.

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.

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

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.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to using strategic foresight in your business. The key is to experiment, find what works for you, and adapt as needed.

You should read this if… you are struggling with unclear briefs, misaligned expectations, or work that becomes more complicated than it needs to be. This article introduces the CPQQRT framework—Context, Purpose, Quality, Quantity, Resources, and Time—as a practical way to manage complexity by dramatically improving clarity in how work is defined and delegated. It explains how using CPQQRT helps leaders articulate what needs to be done, why it matters, what “good” looks like, and the constraints involved, reducing confusion, rework, and frustration while enabling teams to deliver stronger outcomes in complex organisational environments.

A good way to create alternative views of futures is by building scenarios. This involves bringing together different trends, phenomena, and uncertainties to understand their interdependence and joint implications.

One way that long-range planning is enhanced is through the creation of various alternative futures, which are significantly different from one another. The scenarios that planners create can be based on different assumptions about technology, demography, economics, politics, and other factors.

When it comes to planning, looking at what's in the rearview mirror is not enough. You need to look ahead through the windshield at the road ahead.

You should watch this video if… you are interested in better ways to plan in the face of uncertainty, complexity, and uncomfortable realities. This article explores the concepts of Black Elephants, Black Swans, and Black Jellyfish as practical lenses for future‑informed planning—helping leaders distinguish between risks they see but avoid, shocks they don’t expect, and issues that appear manageable but can escalate unexpectedly. It shows how deliberately identifying and exploring all three concepts expands strategic thinking, supports more resilient and diversified plans, and strengthens an organisation’s ability to respond thoughtfully to disruption rather than being surprised by it.

For-purpose CEOs and Boards will need to consider some big challenges as they plan for the next 5 to 10 years.

The best response to the turbulence and uncertainty being faced by the not-for-profit sector is to focus on delivering long-term value. This means having a 5 to 10 view of how the world is changing and how your organisation will respond to, exploit, or mitigate these changes. This is not about the prediction of the future, a futile activity, but rather about being ready for what might happen next.

You should read this if… you are a leader in business who wants a clearer way to strengthen planning and decision‑making in an uncertain, fast‑changing environment. This article introduces two simple but powerful frames for planning: understanding that every plan is built on a mix of knowledge and assumptions, and recognising that real‑world outcomes are shaped by how plans collide with reality. It explains how making assumptions explicit, testing them with foresight tools, and planning for shifting conditions helps leaders design more adaptable strategies—reducing surprise, improving execution, and increasing the likelihood that plans deliver impact and future growth even as circumstances change.

In a competitive world, an organisation's success is determined by its ability to stay ahead of others and adapt to the needs of its stakeholders and the fast-changing world it operates in.

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.

Forward thinking leaders need to develop the ability to scan for signals, issues and trends that are developing now and create a view on how they might play across a range of futures.

It can be easy to believe that tomorrow will be like today—that customers will have the same demands, that businesses will operate in the same way, or that Governments will make similar decisions. These beliefs are comforting, in part because they suggest that nothing fundamental will change in our futures. But if we believe these things about futures, then we are limiting those who come after us to live in a world that is less than what it could be.