At the start of this year, Deloitte’s 2026 Global Chief Strategy Officer Survey highlighted a challenge that will feel familiar to many leaders: more than half of the CSOs surveyed said they were managing too many priorities with too little time.

The same research found that CSOs spend just 13% of their time in the ‘sentinel’ role – sensing and interpreting shifts in the external environment.

Seven months on, those pressures probably feel even more acute. Leaders are simultaneously navigating geopolitical disruption, economic pressure, rapid technological change and increasingly visible climate impacts – while still being expected to deliver against immediate commercial goals.

In this environment, foresight can easily slip down the agenda. Looking further ahead feels like something to return to beyond the current crisis or when there is more space to think.

The problem: this is exactly when foresight matters most.

While foresight is traditionally more focused on the long term, the same foresight mindset can be applied across different horizons, with methods adapted to the decision and timeframe. It can help organisations explore uncertainty over the next 12 months, three years or a decade. The horizon should align with the decision.

Don't put the future on hold

Foresight delivers most value when it becomes part of how the organisation plans, makes decisions and responds to change. It isn’t a periodic exercise or workshop.

That may sound idealistic when budgets and bandwidth are already under pressure. But embedding foresight doesn't have to mean creating another major process, new methodology or engagement programme. In fact, the opposite is more effective.

The starting point is to connect foresight directly to the decisions the organisation already needs to make – and the stakeholders who need to make them.

Bring foresight in at the beginning, not the end

If strategic or business plans have essentially been decided before the future is considered, foresight rapidly becomes an interesting sense-check. It needs to inform the assumptions, choices and priorities that shape the plan from the outset.

That means aligning foresight activity with existing planning cycles and decision points rather than treating it as an additional exercise. For insight and foresight practitioners, the challenge is to understand when decisions are being made and get useful future intelligence into the room at the right moment.

Start with the decision, not the methodology

Busy leaders need useful input into decisions, not another process to learn.

Rather than beginning with trends, scanning systems or scenarios, start with the commercial goal to define a central question for foresight. What are we trying to achieve? What needs to be true for the strategy to work? What external changes could materially alter our prospects?

That gives foresight a clear central question, keeps horizon scanning focused and links its value directly to a live business priority – making it easier to justify when budgets and bandwidth are tight.

Make foresight continuous – but keep it manageable

A scenario exercise can be valuable, but foresight has greater impact when it is kept live. That means continuing to track how the external environment is evolving against the strategic question at hand – focusing on the uncertainties and signals that matter most, while still leaving space for the unexpected.

The aim is to create a simple feedback loop: what are we seeing, what might it mean, does it change anything about our assumptions, priorities or actions – and what would we do if the opposite happens?

In practice, that might mean reviewing the status of priority signals and any emerging shifts alongside quarterly strategy updates, or stress-testing a potential initiative against several plausible futures before approval.

Done well, foresight becomes part of rolling planning rather than a periodic research exercise.

From uncertainty to preparedness

Crucially, uncertainty can make organisations hesitant. When the future feels increasingly difficult to read, it becomes harder to commit to a strategy, innovation pipeline or capital allocation.

Foresight won't remove that uncertainty, but it can make it more explicit and manageable. A strategy can be stress-tested against different plausible conditions. Teams can identify where it appears resilient, where it is exposed and which assumptions need watching. Organisations can develop contingencies before they are urgently needed.

You can’t predict the future, but you can gain confidence from being better prepared to recognise change and adapt to it. And that confidence can extend beyond individual decisions.

Foresight can give teams a shared understanding of change, help align people around where the organisation is heading and create greater collective readiness to deal with what comes next. In volatile times, that bolsters resilience – rather than being a luxury.

In short: don’t ask overloaded leaders to spend more time thinking about the future. Make thinking about the future a routine part of how the organisation operates today.

It’s a challenge – and an opportunity – we’ll be exploring further at the MRS Foresight Conference on 14th October.

Pippa Goodman is co-founder and managing director at Next Up

• Pippa’s colleagues Josh McBain and John Robson are chairing the MRS Foresight Conference on 14^th October 2026.