How Foresight Can Enhance Strategic Resilience in a Time of Turbulence

Key Points

• A series of abrupt shocks and enduring transformations are reshaping the context for sustainable business.
• The disconnect between short-, medium-, and long-term imperatives is growing—creating tensions and tradeoffs for companies and requiring more agile and flexible strategy.
• In this new era, companies should integrate strategic foresight into their strategy processes to navigate shocks and volatility, retain clarity of purpose, and identify opportunity, even amidst disruption.

Navigating a New Reality 

Over the past year, the world has entered a turbulent new era—marked by a set of abrupt shocks that are intersecting with, and complicating, enduring, long-term transformations. Sudden disruptions, like unpredictable tariffs and rapid AI advances, are colliding with longer-term shifts, such as intensifying climate impacts and diversifying societies, evolving faster than conventional strategies can adapt. 

In addition, growing alignment across short-, medium-, and long-term sustainability considerations has now fractured. For example, just a few short years ago in the United States, imperatives to act on DEI were increasingly aligned across all time horizons. The near-term political pressures to act, galvanized by movements such as Black Lives Matter, aligned with emerging policy directions as well as the growing diversification of society. Now, however, near-term political backlash against DEI in the U.S. may run counter to medium-term policy expectations or long-term demographic trends. Businesses must increasingly grapple with such tensions and tradeoffs across time horizons rather than planning in linear trajectories. 

At the same time, businesses are facing parallel fragmentation across geographies and jurisdictions. Where there was once a push toward global alignment—on climate disclosure, human rights expectations, and sustainable finance regulations—there is now a growing divergence. The result is a fractured landscape in which a company’s sustainability strategy may be celebrated in one market and penalized in another. 

Building Strategy for a Fragmented Future 

This is not just a more complex environment—it’s a different kind of strategic terrain, one that requires global companies to strategically navigate across divergent politics, timelines, and legal regimes.  

In this context, sustainability strategy must be adaptive rather than static. Long-term success will require companies to combine north-star vision with short-term agility—and to make regular, deliberate choices about how to navigate the tensions between them. 

This is where strategic foresight becomes essential. Foresight isn’t about making predictions—rather, it is a structured way of thinking about the future that can help companies make better decisions in the face of uncertainty. By understanding key drivers of change, stress-testing plans against divergent future possibilities, and articulating a guiding vision, foresight supports organizations in anticipating what’s coming, adapting to volatility with integrity, and staying grounded in long-term purpose. 

Companies should embed foresight into sustainability strategy across three time horizons: 

1. Short-Term: Adapting Without Losing Focus 

In today’s volatile environment, abrupt shocks—such as political pushback or regulatory reversals—can create reactive mindsets. Strategy should not change with the headwinds, yet also can’t ignore the current turbulence. The challenge is to discern what is transient versus what will have lasting impacts, and reconfigure the path to long-term goals. 

Structured foresight exercises can help teams identify where short-term developments create new risks, tradeoffs, or opportunities. These conversations can help surface the dilemmas organizations will need to navigate and help avoid reactive decision-making that undermines long-term vision. 

One way to explore short-term volatility is through future simulations—facilitated role-playing exercises that allow teams to rehearse responses to plausible near-term disruptions, such as regulatory shifts, AI governance dilemmas, or political backlash. These sessions help surface potential points of tension across functions, identify ethical and legal dilemmas, and clarify where contingency plans may be needed.

2. Medium-Term: Preparing for Trends and Uncertainties 

In the rush to respond to short-term uncertainty, sustainability and business leaders should be wary of taking their eye off the horizon and losing sight of what’s still to come. The medium-term will be shaped by clearly discernible trends (established patterns of change with observable directionality over time), such as intensifying climate impacts, as well as countertrends, such as the anti-ESG backlash. It is also characterized by deep uncertainty around issues such as geopolitical relations and technology deployment. Strategy must aim to be both resilient and adaptive. 

Analyzing trends, countertrends, and emerging issues is an important way to help clarify the direction of travel. Here, it is particularly important to map out the collision of trends and countertrends, as well as their geographical specificities. What may look chaotic on the surface is often the result of coherent drivers of change interacting in complex fashion.    

For deeper uncertainties, the use of future scenarios can enable teams to develop resilient strategies that can succeed across a wider range of possible futures. Scenarios are structured, narrative-based depictions of multiple plausible future operating environments. They are not predictions, but tools to explore uncertainty, challenge assumptions, and stress-test strategies against divergent outcomes. 

Both trend and scenario analysis are vital. Using them together enables strategy teams to stress-test strategic priorities, right-size ambition levels, and build agility and flexibility into how they carry out their strategies in a world of accelerating change. 

3. Long-Term: Vision as a Decision-Making Tool 

Even amid turbulence, long-term vision still matters—and arguably more than ever. A strong sustainability vision should not only inspire but serve as a decision-making tool: guiding tradeoffs, prioritizing investments, and defining red lines that help the company act with clarity and consistency during moments of upheaval. 

Foresight frameworks can help companies articulate a transformative vision of the future and identify various innovation pathways to achieve it. For instance, Three Horizons, a foresight tool for navigating long-term transformation, can help organizations understand the current system (Horizon 1), explore transitional innovations (Horizon 2), and articulate a future vision aligned with emerging needs and values (Horizon 3). Reconnecting with that Horizon 3 vision, even (or especially) in moments of turbulence, helps organizations stay on course while remaining flexible about the route. 

Strategy for a Time of Transition 

The road ahead will be defined by rapid change and disruption, but it will also be shaped by the choices companies make today. 

By embracing foresight, companies can strengthen their ability to anticipate and adapt without losing sight of who they are and what they stand for. This is how futures thinking can support resilient, purpose-driven sustainability strategy and help business lead through crisis, rather than simply endure it. 

This article was originally published at the BSR website "Sustainability Insights" and is written by Jacob Park, Director Sustainable Futures Lab, Margot Brent, Associate Director, Transformation, and Nine Weijenborg, Associate Director, Transformation and Financial Services at BSR.