Organizations often say they “do foresight.” What they usually mean is that they collect trends, build or purchase scenario reports, and run ad-hoc foresight workshops—either internally or with the help of consultants—but only when they have the time and resources. It is not unusual for foresight to be treated as something you do when you have spare capacity, or merely to tick a box on a long to-do list crowded with other priorities. Worse still, it is sometimes pursued only after a crisis has already struck and caused damage.
What’s missing is not effort. It’s continuity in foresight efforts. A continuity that does not only involve foresight enthusiasts or the main team, but the wider organization, a system.
A minimum viable foresight system is not about doing everything a mature foresight team would be expected to do. It is about doing just enough to meet the needs created by the volatility and complexity of your operating environment, in the right way for your organization. The main goal is to ensure that futures insights are used by decision-makers, and preferably created with them. As in any system, you set up the basic elements and plan weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual activities.
Recently, one of our clients asked: “If you had 30 days to build foresight from scratch, what would truly matter, and what should you deliberately leave out?” I thought this was an interesting framing of the question, and it is definitely revealing about the urgency of the subject matter, so I’m sharing the answer with you as well.
Many foresight initiatives fail quietly. Not because the insights are wrong, but because they never become part of how decisions are made. They are not taken seriously. Forecasting is what many are expecting.
Common symptoms include:
The root cause is usually architectural. New foresight teams like to start by planning foresight activities or tangible outputs instead of asking decision-makers about their foresight or futures intelligence needs and general understanding of foresight. Designing a foresight system that fits real organizational needs and meets decision-makers’ expectations is a basic requirement.
Before designing any foresight workflows, the first step is to understand:
Do not let your assumptions guide the way; ask the questions with an open mind and be ready to hear about all the irrelevant wishes as well.
In practice, this means short, focused interviews with key leaders and management teams to clarify:
This mapping should describe your foresight needs via desired results and help you plan the key activities required to deliver them. You can view it as a backcasting exercise: start with the end result to map out all the necessary intermediate steps, key changes, main activities (methods), team roles, a schedule, and a budget. Present your foresight system as a plan with expected ROI. It will be a different level of discussion, as it should be.
In short: do not start with maximizing your limited resources (business as usual thinking). Start with an overview of the maximum benefits, try to quantify them, and then ask for the resources your team needs (the preferable future). Yes, even when building your foresight system, it is necessary to get away from the limiting assumption of one future and think about several futures.
When foresight is anchored in real decision needs and expected benefits, it becomes relevant, difficult to outsource, far more likely to survive its first year, and is taken as seriously as it should be.
A foresight system is not secured by a single report. It becomes viable through repetition that takes you closer to the main benefits.
Within the first 30 days, the goal is to establish a simple, sustainable cadence that turns foresight into a habit rather than a project. For most organizations, a minimal foresight workflow includes:
This is not about volume; it is about a system built on needs and connections. Even if foresight results are formally used only twice a year, if they influence real decisions, the system is already viable. Of course, the more high-quality connection points (where you co-create or support decision-making) you have with managers and leaders (or other decision-makers), the higher the value for money you get from your foresight efforts.
Foresight maturity can grow with accuracy and effort, but foresight lives on its points of use.
A minimum viable foresight system must have at least one clear decision touchpoint where foresight inputs are expected and discussed. This could be:
What matters is that foresight insights are seen as legitimate inputs, not optional background reading.
In many cases, the smallest viable setup includes:
You do not need a large foresight team to start, but you do need people enthusiastic about foresight, willing to take the leap out of business-as-usual. Thus, clarity becomes valuable.
At a minimum, a corporate foresight team requires:
Without this clarity, foresight work risks becoming isolated, hardly rewarding for members of the foresight team, and producing outputs that circulate but do not bring tangible benefits.
As soon as foresight becomes recurring, structure matters more than single efforts. Try to map bottlenecks and barriers, maximize the reach of results, use marketing to share outputs, and arrange collaborative analysis workshops. Use AI tools not to replace humans, but to support collaboration and automation (e.g., automated trend monitoring or debiasing human work when building scenarios).
Signals, insights, assumptions, and interpretations need a shared place where they can be stored, revisited, and connected over time. Otherwise, foresight knowledge fragments across folders, slides, and spreadsheets, and continuity breaks down. This is often the point where organizations realize they need shared foresight infrastructure.
A platform such as FIBRES, designed to support ongoing horizon scanning, sensemaking, and collaboration, can help maintain continuity by keeping signals, trends, and decision-relevant insights connected in one living system.
The key is not the tool itself, but the ability to sustain foresight workflows and institutional memory over time.
Just as important as what you include is what you exclude.
In the first month, I would deliberately leave out:
A minimum viable foresight system should feel focused, purposeful, and slightly incomplete, as you will need to develop it each year. Some incompleteness in foresight creates space for motivated learning and adaptation.
Once that foundation exists, the system can grow in complexity with confidence. The real question is not whether your foresight system is minimal or mature. It is whether it is being used.
What would make foresight viable in your organization within the next 30 days?
FIBRES is designed for rapid deployment and effortless onboarding, so your team can start building its foresight system immediately. If you’re looking for a platform that adapts to your needs and scales with your organization, book a meeting with me to see FIBRES in action.