Foresight and resilience: why we must relearn to think the unthinkable

Stéphanie Ledoux, 15 October 2026

Faced with accelerating disruptions, the proliferation of hybrid crises, and ever-stronger interdependencies, organizations must rethink the way they anticipate. Beyond identified risks and known scenarios, foresight offers another approach: exploring possible futures to better prepare for the unexpected.

Foresight: exploring possible futures rather than predicting what lies ahead

Foresight is not a new discipline. In France, its foundations were laid in the 1950s by the philosopher Gaston Berger, considered one of the fathers of modern foresight.

His insight remains particularly relevant today: the future cannot be regarded as a mere extension of the past. It is therefore no longer enough to observe past and current trends and extrapolate them to understand what might happen.

Unlike forecasting, which seeks to determine what is most likely to happen, foresight involves exploring several possible futures, questioning our certainties, and considering the disruptions likely to profoundly transform our environment.

It does not seek to predict the future, but to broaden our field of thought in order to better inform the decisions we make today.

An approach that is all the more relevant today in the face of accelerating technological, geopolitical, economic, and societal change.

Crises that no longer resemble the ones we had imagined

Our risk management and crisis preparedness models are still largely built on identified scenarios: cyberattacks, system outages, supply disruptions, failure of a critical supplier, etc.

These approaches are essential. They make it possible to structure prevention, continuity, and crisis management programs, and to develop the collective reflexes needed to cope with degraded situations.

But they have one limitation: by preparing so diligently for the crises we know, do we not risk overlooking those we have not yet considered?

The Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, geopolitical tensions, and the acceleration of artificial intelligence have exposed the fragility of some of our certainties.

Crises are becoming increasingly hybrid, systemic, and interdependent. A political decision can trigger an operational crisis. A technological dependency can become a sovereignty issue. An influence campaign can lastingly undermine the trust placed in an organization.

Sometimes there is not even an attack or a technical incident. And yet, the organization is in crisis.

The real challenge, therefore, is no longer just knowing how to manage identified scenarios, but developing our ability to cope with those that do not yet appear on our risk maps.

Foresight, an essential lever for resilience

This is precisely where foresight meets the challenges of resilience.

Practicing foresight does not mean abandoning traditional risk analyses, continuity plans, or crisis management exercises. On the contrary, it means enriching them by broadening the range of hypotheses explored.

What would happen if a critical technology suddenly became inaccessible? If a geopolitical decision called a strategic dependency into question? If several events, until now considered separately, occurred simultaneously and triggered cascading effects?

The goal is not to determine whether these scenarios will happen, but to understand what they reveal about our weaknesses, our dependencies, and our ability to act.

Foresight thus makes it possible to question existing models, reveal their blind spots, and confront organizations with unprecedented situations.

Resilience, after all, is not limited to the ability to apply a plan or restore operations. It also relies on the collective ability to understand a new situation, make decisions under uncertainty, and adjust course when the initial assumptions no longer hold.

Bringing long-term thinking back to leadership bodies

But the conditions for such reflection still need to be created.

In military general staffs and certain state structures, anticipation is a structured function, built into decision-making processes.

In many companies, it remains embryonic, or even non-existent.

Organizations conduct environmental scanning, track trends, and multiply indicators. Yet they ultimately devote little time to collectively exploring possible futures and their strategic implications.

An executive committee cannot, however, limit itself to tracking performance, approving dashboards, and making day-to-day trade-offs. It must also be a space for reflecting on what could profoundly transform the company tomorrow.

This means bringing a long-term perspective back into organizations largely governed by urgency: taking the time to question certainties, challenge assumptions, imagine disruptions, and measure their consequences.

Foresight does not necessarily require complex frameworks. It can start with regular time set aside for reflection, foresight exercises, or scenario-based simulations that allow executives to explore different futures.

The key is not to wait for a disruption to occur before starting to examine its consequences.

Preparing to be surprised

In an increasingly uncertain environment, the ability to make decisions with incomplete information is becoming a strategic skill.

The challenge is no longer to wait until 100% of the information is available before deciding, but to make robust decisions with only 40 or 50% of the facts at hand, while remaining able to reassess them as the situation evolves.

Foresight helps develop precisely this intellectual and collective agility.

It will never make it possible to anticipate every crisis. But it can help organizations avoid being completely helpless when faced with a situation they had not imagined.

Because the goal is not to prepare organizations for every possible scenario. It is to prepare them to be surprised.

And perhaps it starts with a simple question that every executive committee should regularly ask itself:

“What have we not yet imagined that could, tomorrow, profoundly undermine our ability to decide and act?”