About the Foresight Formula at Mars Wrigley

A month into her foresight role at Mars Wrigley, Joanna Lepore started a podcast. She had never hosted one before. There were questions about what the business could discuss publicly, how much it should share and what the new format might achieve. There were also nerves. Interviewing someone well, she discovered, comes with its own pressure.

The response became one of her proudest experiences. People outside Mars Wrigley wanted to share the conversations with colleagues and create something similar themselves. In this episode of Innovation Rockstars, Lepore joins Dr. Christian Mühlroth to explain the thinking behind that openness. She describes a foresight function built to connect long-term change with decisions in the present. The challenge is to make work on distant possibilities useful to a brand manager, an innovation team or a business leader deciding where to invest next.

Be clear about the job foresight is there to do

Lepore describes the Mars Wrigley team as newly established in November 2020. Other parts of Mars already had experience with foresight, but the new function needed a clear mandate of its own.

It would look five and ten years ahead and help the business make strategic choices. Short-term flavour trends already had capable teams looking after them. Foresight needed to add a different perspective, working with strategy, brand planning and colleagues investigating technological change.

“You can't act on what you can't see.”

That is the reason for bringing an outside view into the organisation. The team’s work should make developments visible early enough to influence decisions. Lepore repeatedly brings the conversation back to what someone can do today, rather than treating a long time horizon as a reason to postpone action.

For an R&D organisation, that distinction helps clarify the handoff. Foresight can inform which capabilities to explore, where to test an idea or what assumptions deserve attention, while other teams continue to own delivery.

Keep human motivations at the centre

The team developed a simple way to explain its approach: history, human motivations and signals of change. Lepore presents it as a practical framework tailored to the business, rather than a predictive equation.

Historical context helps reveal patterns and turning points. Signals show how behaviour, technology and the wider environment are changing. Human motivations connect those observations to the needs a business might serve.

“Human needs, human motivations, more or less, they stay the same, but the way that they're enabled and the context that they're enabled in does change.”

Her examples include the tension between wanting to make more sustainable choices and wanting products that are affordable and convenient. The useful question is how a company might help people navigate that tension.

The team developed its approach with a foresight agency, drawing on conversations both inside Mars and with outside practitioners. Internal interviews mattered because a framework must fit the questions a business is ready to address. Lepore describes linking the resulting work directly to existing plans and models so colleagues can see its relevance.

Put the work where decisions are already happening

A new function cannot assume that everyone knows how to use it. Lepore describes the need to explain the team’s purpose and earn attention within a large organisation.

One route is to contribute to active work. What major project is a team pursuing? What tension is it struggling to resolve? Foresight becomes easier to understand when it helps colleagues with a decision they already need to make.

That approach connects the function with innovation teams developing opportunities and sales teams experimenting with channels or digital engagement. Sponsors and internal advocates can then help others understand what the work contributed.

Lepore is candid that these connections were still developing at the time of the conversation. Several teams were new, and their relationships were not fully settled. That makes her account useful for anyone building a capability: relevance has to be established through work, not simply announced through an organisational chart.

Treat outside relationships as part of the practice

External collaboration was an early priority. Lepore describes working with agencies, participating in foresight councils and learning from practitioners in other industries.

Some of that began with a straightforward LinkedIn message. She jokes about being the person who reaches out to say she likes someone’s work and asks for a conversation. Those exchanges opened opportunities for reciprocal learning.

The Future Imagined podcast gave some of that knowledge a format colleagues and outside audiences could use. Its creation also forced practical discussions about openness: what could be shared, what should remain internal and how a company might contribute to a wider professional community.

The point is to widen the range of inputs behind a decision. A development in retail, mobility or another sector may reveal something a confectionery business would miss by looking only at its own category.

Track contribution without claiming every outcome

Measuring foresight is difficult when other teams run the projects it influences. Lepore recognises that problem directly. A recommendation may shape a pilot or an investment without making the foresight team the owner of its eventual result.

She argues for recording those contributions: recommendations, pilots, capabilities developed and connections that lead to new work. Feedback can also show how a conversation changed someone’s thinking or prompted an introduction.

Such evidence does not by itself establish financial return. It does help make an indirect contribution more visible and gives the organisation a basis for learning what is useful.

Lepore also wants colleagues to practise imagination, exploring futures they could help create rather than searching only for a prediction. Her podcast experience reflects that ambition in a modest, tangible way. One unfamiliar format created new conversations, connections and ideas. Foresight became something people could engage with and use, rather than a distant view reserved for a specialist team.