Today, strategic foresight is also under threat from those forces that would squeeze squares into round holes, strip methodologies of the early theories that made them meaningful, and make sexy slides feel actionable to leadership rather than disciplined, arduous, even ambiguous. You just can’t Keep It Simple, Stupid when it’s not. Faced with the complexities of business – high switching costs, long horizons, big-time uncertainty, business model innovation, capital allocation, M&A, conflicting stakeholders aims, power, politics and the fantasy that work can be stupid simple – some leaders have looked to strategic foresight as their decades-old solution.

As America emerged from the shock and awe of its nuclear success in winning World War II, military leaders realized that their traditional planning methods relied too heavily on linear models, did not account for uncertainty and were fixed on consensus-driven, old ways of thinking. Enter the RAND Corporation in 1946, the U.S. Air Force’s non-profit policy think tank, research institute and consulting firm to help shape policy decisions on the Cold War space race, the Vietnam war, the nuclear arms race and issues as innocuous as social welfare and health care.

Initially launched to investigate the long-range planning of future weapons, Project RAND turned planning upside down: preparation took over from prediction; the future was thought of as plural, not singular; stress-test decisions had to be made without evidence existing; and small, unexpected changes were viewed as able to set off big disruptions. In the 1950s, RAND’s expertise included war, weapons, technology, counterterrorism, energy, environment, foreign policy, infrastructure, emergency-management-disaster preparation and just about everything else – all put through the interdisciplinary methodological lenses of scenarios, game theory, cybernetics, Delphi and systems analysis.

The methodology of foresight and its proof of concept had been firmly established. It very much was a success. Then, as typically happens, some RAND employees jumped to the corporate ship to apply the methodology to businesses that had similarly identified a need for better long-term planning, new thinking modes and the capability to better deal with uncertainty. This might be described as foresight’s modern era. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Royal Dutch Shell used what was not yet known as strategic foresight as a foundational, formal part of its scenario planning unit focusing on energy geopolitics, supply chains and OPEC activity. For it, scenarios were a way to construct coherent future states, examine various orders of effects and propel senior executives to confront uncomfortable possibilities. They were not narratives and they were meant to discipline thinking, not inspire it, Scenarios also transformed Shell by explicitly challenging management assumptions and embedding the discipline into the executive decision-making that ultimately prepared Shell for the 1973 oil crisis more than its competitors.

Following the much-cited Shell gold standard, Peter Schwartz’s book Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (1996) became a, if not the, seminal work on scenario planning and what he called ‘rehearsing the future’. Introducing a more palatable and simplistic 2x2 model, Schwartz founded GBN (Global Business Network), scaled the approach via professional services and management consulting, and became one of the main purveyors of foresight in the West for many years. The other standard at this time was Jim Dator and his four archetypes model, based on a distillation of myths, societal patterns and traits associated with them (Continued Growth, Measured Discipline, Collapse, Transformation). For those without patience and processing power, both figuratively and literally speaking, Dator's work, like Schwartz’s, provides a more ‘manageable’ approach vs. the Shell and Rand methods

During this period, the list of corporate users included: General Electric in the 1960s linked long-range planning to environmental scanning, macro trend analysis and capital allocation; at the same time, IBM applied it to early work on computing futures, R&D planning and technology roadmapping; from the 1970s to 1990s AT&T/Bell Labs used it to map long-term tech and communications futures and run networks and information scenarios; then came Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft and Intel. And that’s when the first wave of problem emerged, a problem not of Strategic Foresight’s but of the mindsets, cultures and imperatives of those applying it in the corporate context: business model futures received little attention; forecasting began to supersede plural futures; thinking became not of scenarios but scenario-like; rigidity set in; and organizational politics disabled decisions and activations.

Perhaps in response to this, what had become an admixture of future studies, forecasting, foresight and even trend spotting and commenting got a strong reminder from Richard Slaughter of RAND’s focus when he dropped the title Strategic Foresight in his book, Foresight beyond strategy (1996). An educator, editor and futures scholar/theorist, Slaughter sought to redefine strategic foresight not as tools and outputs (which corporations are addicted to) but as human and institutional capability (which lies semi-dormant in most corporations). For him, it was a capacity to think (differently), inquire into the uncertain and a way to enhance collective intelligence. Unfortunately, some new adopters nudged the practice towards becoming teach-able in short formats rather than a full blown discipline, more about inspiration rather than disciplined education, and increasingly detached from its analytic footings.

With the likes of BMW, Disney, Google, Amazon and Unilever joining its user list, strategic foresight’s next growth spurt was either a further erosion of methodology or an opportunity to re-apply rigour to a new mandate. This was the innovation era and it saw the discipline exponentially expand. It is also when I first encountered strategic foresight.

As my former CEO wrote in his book Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation (2013), foresight was a critical component of his methodology for locating future opportunities. Aligning it with his anthropology-centric insights process, he believed the two disciplines could collaborate on identifying today’s unmet consumer needs and the unknown needs of tomorrow. He did this by hiring Mat and Ricky.

Mat Lincez, the co-founder of Human Futures who helped bring the disciplinary worlds of foresight and anthropology to fruition along with our CEO, and his partner, were two of the brightest, most original thinkers I had ever met. With a much smaller anthropology team back in those days, I used to refer to them as 2-RAND, because they felt like a natural extension of my team, so steadfastly adhered to the discipline’s first rules and regulations, tried to strictly follow its methodology and kind of reminded me of think tank spies.

Together, we tried to detail every intersection between foresight and insight. Both Mat and Ricky added a brand new perspective to my consumer field research. Mat and I collaborated on our firm’s first product and packaging innovation. And the two of them and their future theories occasionally drove Idris nuts. But it worked. Like, crazy worked.

In fact, it worked so well that I have to attribute some significant degree of the increased popularization of foresight at the time to Idris extolling its virtues and admonishing his competitive consultants for not applying it on his blog postings at the time. Trust me, the man had a lot of readers, some looking to poach innovative ideas. And that is where we are at with the most recent – and perhaps most threatening – problem for strategic foresight: the consultant class.

Today, much foresight looks impressive, feels provocative and is missing the rigour our old boss loved so much. The main reason for this current problem is obvious: although there are great universities that offer Master’s programs in foresight, strategic foresight or future studies, there is no official or socially-regulated watchdog that enforces standards and licenses practitioners. As a result, futurist and foresighter have become self-assigned labels those who have completed a 3-day course use to look professionally relevant on LinkedIn. For them, foresight is usually an exercise in creativity and a consulting product where experience is implied, not demonstrated. Often replete with predictions rather than preparations, their authority is based on client slides with the key buzzwords (disruption, emergent), new-trend methods (design fiction), runaway speculative language and an avoidance of uncertainty.

These people are the new stars of foresight theatre. And few, if any, of them can perform innovation. They ignore Slaughter’s critiques of power, values and responsibility. They promote some combination of seeing the future with the bells and whistles of technology. And unless mass delusion has taken over, they know exactly what they’re doing. They are further eroding the theory and methodology of foresight. Those who don’t have a track record of confronting uncertainty through or making innovation happen or who aren’t the insanely rare 1% genius are surely not your best candidates to help you consider tomorrow. That you should be certain about, today.