Navigating Tomorrow's World: Insights into Futures Studies

Daria (Dasha) Krivonos and her risk colleagues had worked through a troubling scenario: a large container ship could become stuck in the Suez Canal and block a major route for global trade. She recalls taking the analysis to shipping colleagues and finding that the discussion quickly turned to her credentials. Had she ever been on a ship? What did someone from corporate know about it?

Years later, she saw news of a ship blocking the canal. It belonged to another company, but the experience stayed with her. In this episode of Innovation Rockstars, the CEO of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies uses the story to explain a recurring leadership problem. A plausible warning can be dismissed because the messenger, or the future being described, does not fit the room's expectations.

A convincing plan can hide its own assumptions

Krivonos does not describe foresight as predicting exactly what will happen. She calls a futurist a professional explorer of possible outcomes, someone prepared to keep asking what if, including when the answers feel uncomfortable.

That discipline challenges an organization's attachment to its preferred future. Once leaders settle on an attractive direction, attention can turn inward: which systems to build, whom to recruit and how to organize delivery. The external conditions required for success receive less attention.

Krivonos suggests temporarily setting the strategy aside and asking what needs to be true outside the organization for it to work. Some conditions can be influenced. Others cannot be controlled but can be understood through established trends. Some are both outside the company's control and genuinely uncertain.

The last group deserves particular scrutiny. For an R&D portfolio, it can include assumptions that make a development program attractive but that the team cannot guarantee. Naming them gives leaders something to monitor and challenge as the work progresses.

Krivonos adds another test: does the plan require certain developments to continue, others to stop, or still others to reverse? Writing those expectations down can make a comfortable strategic story look considerably less certain.

Agreement can arrive too quickly

Krivonos trained as an economist and worked in corporate risk before joining the Institute. Leading people from very different disciplines changed how she understood her own expertise. Economics remained valuable, but it could not explain every way the future might unfold.

She describes the Institute as a place where ideas collide. An economic argument encounters a historian's perspective, a sociologist's questions or a younger colleague's different understanding of society. The purpose is to produce a more credible view by exposing it to challenges its author might never generate alone.

Her warning to leaders is pointed:

“If you're discussing something very complex and people agree too soon, that means somebody's lying or somebody's missing.”

She makes a distinction between straightforward decisions about next week and difficult discussions about the world a decade from now. The latter should contain disagreement. Leading that conversation can be uncomfortable, especially when colleagues regularly challenge the person responsible for making the final decision.

For Krivonos, that discomfort is part of the value. A meeting that is harder to resolve may have revealed more of the problem. The task is to use the disagreement rather than treating quick consensus as proof of good thinking.

Protect time for what has not happened yet

Krivonos saw how easily long-term issues lost their place in senior management discussions. Risk was important, everyone agreed. But quarterly results or an operational incident could shorten the time available to discuss it. The future faces the same competition for attention.

Its apparent distance makes postponement easy. There seems to be time to prepare later, until the issue arrives as a present-day problem. She argues for deliberate allocation of time and resources before that happens.

Organizational placement matters as well. A foresight role can struggle if it is expected to justify every contribution through immediate financial results. Krivonos recommends strong support from the top and a connection to the board, whose responsibility for the company's longevity extends beyond an individual executive's immediate reporting cycle.

This is her argument for a mandate to participate in consequential discussions. Foresight specialists need room to examine plausible developments that may never occur, alongside the business's obligation to make decisions now. Calling them in only when a long-range perspective is convenient limits what they can contribute.

Apply the same questions to your own work

Krivonos catches herself making a revealing assumption when the conversation turns to AI. Her first thought was that foresight would examine how AI affected other parts of society. Then she realized she had not properly considered what it could change about her own profession.

She acknowledges that AI could assist with, or replace, parts of the work her organization performs. That creates a question about where it will continue to add value. The discipline of considering alternative futures has to apply to the futurists, too.

Her Suez story brings the discussion back to the cost of refusing that exercise. In her account, the team could explain a sequence of plausible events. The problem was getting colleagues to engage with the outcome rather than dismissing the people presenting it. She offers a memorable caution about relying on confidence alone:

“And sometimes a gut feeling in the boardroom is just the stomach flu.”

The useful response is to examine the reasoning. Which step is implausible? Which assumption no longer holds? What would the organization do if the scenario began to develop? Those questions give a difficult future a fair hearing while there is still time to prepare for it.