How Continuous Foresight Helps to Dream Big

Kara Cunzeman remembers sitting in a training session when the audience was asked who practised horizon scanning regularly. Most people raised their hands. She did not. Her organisation had relevant knowledge and activity in different places, but no deliberate, shared practice for collecting signals. The moment helped her see an opportunity: bring that expertise together and use it more systematically in decisions about the future.

In this episode of Innovation Rockstars, Cunzeman joins Dr. Christian Mühlroth to discuss the strategic foresight initiative at The Aerospace Corporation. Speaking during the pandemic, she describes work that combines technical knowledge with creative exploration, including a physical map of possible space futures. Her story raises a practical challenge for R&D leaders: collecting evidence about where things appear to be heading is only part of the work. Teams also need time to imagine where they could go and what they would want to create.

Build on expertise without letting it narrow the view

Cunzeman came to foresight through engineering and systems work. An internal science and technology project prompted her to look for better ways to use limited resources and increase the organisation’s impact.

That search led to training, then an internal research project exploring how to establish foresight. She describes the initiative as still developing at the time of the conversation, with progress and momentum rather than a finished system.

Technical depth offered a strong starting point. Aerospace had specialists across fields relevant to space who could help interpret developments. But expertise also needed other perspectives to challenge familiar assumptions.

Cunzeman is clear about the purpose of the work:

“I don't predict the future.”

The methods help people explore possibilities and prepare through decisions made today. They cannot remove every surprise. Treating foresight as a guarantee would create another false certainty instead of improving how the organisation handles uncertainty.

Work with both the push and the pull

Cunzeman distinguishes between the “push” and “pull” of the future. The push includes signals, technologies and evidence about change already under way. The pull concerns possible directions, aspirations and futures people might help bring into being.

She sees organisations putting considerable effort into the first. The second is harder to fit into working life. Leaders often need to justify decisions with existing evidence, while imagination requires time to explore something less established.

Both have a role. A team that only follows visible trends may miss a different possibility. A team that only imagines possibilities may struggle to connect them with practical choices.

Cunzeman describes bringing creative colleagues and external perspectives into discussion, allowing time for exercises and conversation. The aim is to question what appears obvious before that view becomes the unquestioned basis for a plan.

Give people something they can hold and revisit

The Pathfinder’s Guide to the Space Enterprise made that approach tangible. Cunzeman and colleagues wanted a physical futures map that people could take away, put on a wall and return to with new questions.

She describes contributions from more than 70 experts and other participants, with workshops producing over 400 ideas that were narrowed to around 70. The team then spent a week together working through ways to communicate the material.

The eventual map was deliberately abstract rather than a linear timeline. It organised possibilities into themes and invited people to consider relationships across them. Its purpose was exploration, rather than a schedule of events expected to happen.

Cunzeman’s advice to anyone making a visual product is straightforward:

“Have your media team be part of the process from day one.”

Communication was part of developing the work, not a finishing step after the analysis. Designers helped the team find a form that could carry the ideas and remain useful to an audience beyond the specialists who produced them.

Examine the wider system around a technology

The map explored more than vehicles and technical capabilities. Cunzeman discusses resources, participants, infrastructure and the kinds of people who might work in a changing space economy.

Those themes prompt questions about the surrounding conditions for an opportunity. Who could take part? What infrastructure would be required? How might benefits reach people on Earth? Which assumptions about the workforce deserve reconsideration?

The interview includes ambitious possibilities, but the useful lesson is the breadth of the inquiry. An emerging technology does not operate independently of the people, institutions and systems around it.

For a corporate innovation team, that encourages a wider assessment of a proposal. Technical progress matters, but so do the relationships and capabilities needed for someone to use it. A futures exercise can make those dependencies visible before a team commits to a narrow solution.

Use a platform to support the conversation

Cunzeman also discusses plans for an end-to-end digital foresight platform with ITONICS. Her small team was handling substantial information manually and tailoring analysis for different decision-makers.

The intended benefit was to organise signals, make connections visible and give practitioners more time for insight. She describes the platform as support for people-centred activities: regular discussion, scenario workshops, executive engagement and contributions from external experts.

These were plans and expectations in the interview, not a reported implementation outcome. The platform would not replace the people evaluating evidence or deciding what it meant.

That emphasis connects to Cunzeman’s personal motivation. Becoming a parent had strengthened her concern for what future generations would inherit. Foresight, in her account, creates room to consider that longer view alongside immediate demands. The practical starting point remains modest: bring people together, make their knowledge accessible and give them permission to ask what else might be possible.