How TU Delft built a strategic foresight capability to strengthen decision-makingunder deep uncertainty

What would happen if international student mobility declined sharply? What if geopolitical tensions disrupt research collaboration? What if public trust in science weakened? What if access to talent becomes more constrained?

These and other scenarios illustrate how Delft University of Technology uses plausible futures to challenge strategic assumptions and strengthen decision-making under conditions of deep uncertainty. Rather than predicting the future, plausible futures are used pragmatically to expose the assumptions on which current policies depend and to test their robustness under alternative future conditions.

Universities increasingly operate under conditions of deep uncertainty. Deep uncertainty refers to situations in which reliable interpretations of developments become increasingly uncertain and contested, causal relationships are insufficiently understood, and extrapolation from past observations no longer provides a reliable basis for decision-making.

Under these conditions, strategic decision-making increasingly depends on understanding the external conditions on which universities rely. Within the Delft Strategic Foresight Approach, these conditions are conceptualized as critical dependencies that enable the university to fulfill its mission.

Artificial intelligence is transforming the way universities educate and conduct research. Climate change is increasingly affecting campus infrastructure and university operations through more frequent extreme weather events. Demographic shifts are influencing talent pipelines. Geopolitical developments are reshaping international collaboration. How these developments will ultimately affect universities remains highly uncertain. Therefore, Dr. Gert Jan Scheurwater, Director of Foresight & Strategy Development at TU Delft, states that “foresight becomes particularly valuable when causal relationships are unclear and conventional planning is no longer sufficient.”

Building a foresight capability

In 2023, TU Delft’s Executive Board established a dedicated Strategic Foresight & Innovation unit within the university’s Strategy Development directorate. The decision reflected a broader recognition that universities operate in increasingly complex environments, and that foresight should be connected directly to strategy development rather than treated as a separate activity.

“Universities can be understood as complex adaptive systems with distributed decision-making, multiple simultaneous strategy and policy processes, and a high degree of autonomy of academic professionals.”

That organizational reality shaped the way foresight was introduced at TU Delft.

The foresight team supports strategic questions across faculties, departments, and professional services while helping different parts of the university develop their own foresight capabilities. The result is a shared capability that supports decision-making throughout the institution. As the capability matured, TU Delft also invested in supporting information- infrastructure. FIBRES now provides a shared environment for horizon scanning.

TU Delft’s way of work is documented in the Delft Strategic Foresight Approach (DSFA), a framework developed by the TU Delft Strategic Foresight & Innovation unit to help universities engage systematically with uncertainty, challenge assumptions, and strengthen preparedness.

Testing assumptions

A distinguishing feature of TU Delft’s approach is its focus on testing the assumptions that often are taken for granted. The foresight process asks which assumptions current strategies depend on, what happens if those assumptions under plausible future conditions no longer hold and what strategic options are available.

“Foresight has increased awareness of implicit assumptions, cognitive biases, and strategic blind spots.”

Universities often rely on conditions that feel permanent until they begin to change, e.g., stable funding, international mobility, academic freedom, public trust, reliable digital infrastructure, access to talent, and geopolitical stability.

The foresight work asks: What happens if one of these conditions changes significantly? That shift in perspective has helped create new conversations across the university. It is a example of how strategic foresight helps make dependencies visible before they become vulnerabilities.

Seminars, masterclasses, interviews, workshops, and foresight exercises are used to bring external developments into strategic discussions and help participants examine issues from multiple perspectives.

Stress testing

One of the practical methods developed by TU Delft is the Foresight Lab. These exercises use “what if” scenarios and stress tests to examine how existing policies and strategies perform under different future conditions. The outputs are then used to support strategic discussions and policy development.

A recent Foresight Lab focused on PhD policy illustrates the process. Participants tested current policies against several plausible future scenarios. During the exercise, hidden dependencies emerged. Existing approaches relied on assumptions about continued geopolitical stability, sustained access to international talent, and the persistence of current funding arrangements.

“The exercise highlighted implicit dependencies, including assumptions about geopolitical stability, talent availability, and existing funding structures.”

The exercise helped leadership teams evaluate the resilience of current policies and identify areas where additional strategic options might be needed.

Horizon monitoring

Monitoring developments across technology, policy, research, geopolitics, and society can generate an overwhelming amount of information to process for even the most experienced foresight teams. Making sense of those signals requires more than collecting articles and reports.

The team needed a structured way to capture signals, classify them, connect them to strategic questions, and maintain traceability back to original sources.

According to Alexandra Czarnecka, Policy Advisor Strategic Foresight & Strategy Development, “FIBRES has significantly strengthened our horizon scanning capability by providing a structured way to capture, classify, and analyze signals from the external environment.” The team now maintains a centralized, living repository of futures intelligence where observations accumulate, remain searchable, traceable, and continuously reusable.

The platform enables the foresight team to organize signals around TU Delft’s critical external dependencies: the external conditions that are necessary for the university to fulfil its mission. This forms the basis of further sense-making and strategic analysis in e.g. Foresight Briefings and Alerts, providing a shared conceptual structure and intelligence base for monitoring developments that may affect the university’s future.

By combining traceability, collaboration, and structured knowledge management in one environment, FIBRES has supported the continued professionalization of TU Delft’s horizon scanning and futures intelligence activities.

Structural embedding

Many organizations still approach foresight through ad hoc projects, reports, workshops, or annual exercises. TU Delft has chosen to institutionalize strategic foresight as a permanent organizational capability. This will strengthen the university’s capacity to make robust strategic decisions under conditions of deep uncertainty.

TU Delft’s experience illustrates a broader lesson for organizations navigating uncertainty. It is about making better decisions today by testing assumptions, building a shared understanding of change, and preparing for multiple plausible futures. Organizations that treat foresight as a continuous capability and integrate it into decision making are likely better equipped to adapt as the world changes around them.

Curious how leading organizations are building and improving their foresight capabilities? Learn more about FIBRES or book a personalized walkthrough to see how the platform supports continuous, collaborative foresight at any scale.