Lenkova introduces the concept of the “decision gap,” which she defines as the space between having available information and actually deciding to act on it. She explains that leadership teams often struggle not with a lack of information, but with the inability to reallocate resources before certainty arrives. The discussion covers how insights and foresight teams can better integrate into decision-making processes, moving from being information providers to strategic advisers.
Identifying the Decision Gap
We always love to talk to new authors and foresights is closely related to market research and consumer insights. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to write this book?
“It may come as a surprise to you, but I’m actually not from an insights background,” says Lenkova. “I have always worked with insights teams. However, I come from a brand innovation and strategy background. Over the last two decades, I have worked across fast-moving consumer goods, financial services, and global entertainment brands. Along the way, I also trained as a futurist inside a corporate role. And I think that distinction matters because it meant that I was practicing foresight in a commercially accountable environment, always sitting at or very close to the decision table.”
In 2019, Lenkova founded Futures Forward, a London-based consultancy in strategy, innovation, and foresight, where she has worked across sectors on the same question: How do organizations actually turn foresight into practical decisions?
Lenkova also currently holds a director role in cultural and futures intelligence at the LEGO Group. (Editor’s Note: All opinions are her personal opinions, and Lenkova is participating in this podcast in her personal capacity.)
The book, Lenkova relates, is a reflection of her years of experience in foresight: “The book was inspired by this pattern that I kept seeing across the board, not just in corporate, but also in my consultancy across NGOs, public institutions where teams were producing excellent foresight work. They were creating scenarios. They were monitoring signals. There were these beautiful trend reports, and there would be a presentation in the boardroom, and everybody would agree. Yes. This is really insightful. Yes. This will impact us. And, sadly, what happens after that and after this excitement kind of dissipates, the system that we are working within pushes us to go back into making decisions that are shaped by short-term pressure. There’s a lot of fires to put out, and somehow a large proportion of this foresight and this future intelligence just stays in that room.”
“This is something that I wanted to address,” she says. “I call this in the book the decision gap. This is the space between having available information and actually deciding to act on it.”
Sitting at the Decision Table
You brought up being at the table—at the decision table—and how this is so important for a futurist role, and also for insights professionals as well. They’re always striving to make their insights have impact. Tell us more about the decision gap in your book. In your work with organizations, what does this gap look like in practice?
“The decision gap is not an information problem,” says Lenkova. “Most leadership teams I have worked with have enough intelligence and information, and sometimes it seems like they are asking for more and more. They have access to dashboards, to trend reports, to geopolitical briefings, and AI summaries. We live in an age right now where we have so much content, context, and information at our fingertips.”
“But if we have all of this information, then why are we asking for more? Why aren’t we really using that information to make decisions?” asks Lenkova. “They’re not short on information, but what they’re short of is this willingness or ability or the structure to make a decision and to reallocate meaningful resources before certainty arrives. The problem seems to be that we’re still very much operating with the posture of we need to be certain and we need to see evidence and we need to be able to predict so that we can make a safe decision. Sadly, this is not the world that we’re living in, and that’s the whole notion of foresight. Foresight is not there to predict. It’s not there to give you certainty. It’s not there to tell you this is exactly what the world is going to look like. It’s more of a space to rehearse and to inform you as much as possible, but I think the mindset is slightly different to what a lot of leaders still have.”
“Foresight is a space to train decision making in times of uncertainty,” Lenkova continues. “While a leadership team acknowledges there is a shift while they’re in the boardroom and they read the reports, they listen to the experts and so on and discuss it openly as well. But I think when the moment comes to move capital away from something that is an established revenue stream and towards something that is less certain, this is where the hesitation comes in. It feels like a lot of times not making the decision is actually the wrong decision. But it’s still making a decision.”
Lenkova feels there is a dissonance between the way that organizations are set up and that there needs to be a different mindset when making decisions: “The usual response is to basically try and improve forecasting and kind of squeeze short-term efficiency, and this is exactly the response that keeps that gap open because a lot of times we could be focusing on and optimizing for yesterday’s version of the business because the reward system has not changed. In practice, the decision gap basically shows up as this intellectual agreement during that workshop or that presentation. But it’s very challenging, and I’m not blaming the leadership team. I’m just acknowledging that the way that we’re still set up probably lags a little bit behind the reality of how the world operates now. It’s hard for leaders to translate this behavior and follow through in the governance form even though everybody has the same evidence, but I would say futures intelligence is differentiated from something tangible and something that’s a prediction.”
“But then foresights shows up as a different behavior when decisions need to be made due to personal goals or personal risk posture, personal risk posture versus organizational risk posture, structure, incentives, and so on. It’s not always an easy question to answer,” she says.
Taking Different Foresight Approaches
OK, so there’s a lot of short-term thinking. But it’s difficult to then pivot to that long-term foresight goal of planning ahead. Market researchers also tend to encounter similar issues with their work when trying to influence decisions. What’s some mistakes that you see teams make when they try to translate foresight into strategic action? How would you approach it differently with the practices from your book?
“The mistake may not be made by the insights or foresight team itself,” says Lenkova. “I can speak more from a foresight perspective, but when I gained experience I saw that there’s a different way to progress with foresight. But foresight is quite a counterintuitive, ambiguous, very different mindset to how organizations are set up. When somebody’s new to foresight, or has an academic background, a lot of times we would go into a room of people in corporate who have a specific way of operating and are each set usually on a short-term basis, and have very strong opinions, and say things like this is not how you do foresight. You’re not able to predict.”
She adds, “But I’ve changed how I approach things now. What has helped me is that I have been on the other side. I have worked in strategy, in corporate brand development and innovation management, and I have set up teams, structures, and processes. What is helping me in the way that I approach it now is I use that knowledge, and I also appreciate that even a small step forward is a step forward. Instead of going in very strong and determined that, I’m going to fight this fight, it’s always an uphill battle, I actually try to find ways even to change some of the tools of foresight to kind of match with the processes that currently exist and just make sure that foresight is available there as an extra lens when decisions are being made.”
“Foresight professionals research what is happening today. We make hypothesis for the future, and then a good practice would be to follow the indicators that prove or disprove the hypothesis. I feel like there is a lot that this practice can give in terms of deciding today and information that is relevant for the decisions today,” says Lenkova. “We talk a lot about scenarios in foresight, but scenario is just one tool. There’s a lot more that can be useful. But I also feel that the mistake may not be within the insights or foresight team itself, it could be a mistake by the organization in how they position the foresight or the insights team.”
“In many organizations, the insights function is structurally set up as an information provider, not a strategic adviser,” says Lenkova. “That’s not a comment on the talent inside the insights teams. It’s just an observation on the reporting lines, the incentives and how things are set up. When you’re structurally positioned to provide information, then anything inside that function, including foresight, carries that positioning. Foresight often produces these beautiful trend reports and thoughtful scenarios. And a lot of times, if you don’t have the infrastructure and have that seat at the table where decisions are being made, there’s only so much you can do. If you don’t have the agency and the decision-making power, then your information may not make it into the decision itself.”
Essentially, there are three viable placements for foresight, notes Lenkova. The first one would be inside insights. If insights is treated as a strategic adviser, then foresight will be treated in the same way.
The second placement, she says, that makes sense would be within strategy or anywhere where decisions are being made. This has real advantages because strategy usually sits at that table where decisions are being made by definition. “Where capital allocation, portfolio choices, posture decisions actually happen, I think foresight housed or allowed to participate in these discussions and have agency is much harder to sideline,” she says.
A third option is more democratized across the organization. “While it is great to have a team or a person who’s responsible for foresight, I see a real benefit of actually upscaling various individuals, and teams across the organization,” adds Lenkova. “This was a setup that we had at the Walt Disney Company years ago when I was first trained as a futurist, where at the time, there wasn’t a single team responsible for foresight. This was in addition to our regular roles and jobs, but it was extremely useful because you democratize that skill and use it as an extra skill when you’re making decisions across different areas of the business.”
Supporting Levels of Decision-Making
You mentioned decision-making superpowers. Let’s get into your book a little bit and some of those superpowers. The book features five strategic future labs, which help with decision making, and can help the futurist in their position. Can you walk us through this in practice? How does it help those leadership teams move from, here’s what we’re seeing to here’s what we’re doing about it?
“Essentially, the book has five strategic future labs, and I try to create the book in a way that you don’t have to read it cover to cover if you don’t want to,” says Lenkova. “If you’re a leader who is very busy and you have a specific burning question, you can just go to that chapter, to that lab and go through the exercises. Every lab has the same architecture. You step into a point of view. You’re either a chief marketing officer or head of portfolio or chief strategy officer. And then you’re given this rich realistic situation that is emotionally recognizable to anyone who has sat in that seat. Then you have different tools to answer different questions.”
One of Lenkova’s favorite tools is a slightly modified probability impact matrix.
“It’s a great tool to do in collaboration and opens up a really good discussion,” she says. “It’s also an extremely helpful tool because most of the leaders or decision makers would generally ask for trends. Of course, there are many other things that foresight can do, but even if you have 20 trends that were given to you, it still works great because you’re able to have a discussion and position the trends across the two axis, which is how probable is something to happen and how impactful it will be on the business. Within each one, each quadrant has a dedicated action against it.”
She continues, “Anything that goes into medium to high impact and high probability should already be in your plan. And anything that is medium probability, medium to high impact should be in your scenarios. Based on that tool, then I developed one tool that is my own, which is a strategic decision-making tree where it’s so easy to translate this into strategy. You basically take the trends and you go through the decision tree just having a conversation and deciding whether this is business critical or if you don’t address it, it would be a missed opportunity, for example. Then there are different actions that you can take. It’s a really logical and straightforward approach, but just having the time to have the conversation between the different leaders, each of whom has a specific agenda and a frame, and having an aligned view on that is really helpful.”
Practical Foresight Tools
Speaking of practical frameworks and foresight tools, what can be practical and usable for leaders to make those decisions? Whether it’s next quarter or looking ahead and planning for 2030?
“I think there are several properties of foresight. But first, I think it forces a decision, not just an observation,” she says. “If the output is a report that describes the future, leaders will agree, but then what happens afterwards? But if the output is a choice between different paths, and then the leaders are able to see the consequences of each already mapped, then this opens the discussion and kind of forces a decision.”
“Secondly, it operates on a time scale of the next planning cycle. When we speak about foresight, we speak about scenarios and long-term planning. But there’s so many other steps that go into the information that goes into scenarios that can be used along the way. It can support the decision-making more regularly, and it doesn’t have to be something that is happening ten years from now.”
“Third, if foresight is tied to a governance moment that already exists or a process that already exists, I think the chances of it being taken into account when the decision is being made is much higher,” she says.
It depends on the organization as well, Lenkova indicates. There are organizations that are a lot more flexible that are looking to create new operating models and so on. “But I think it’s a much harder win if you have to change the entire operating system or structure or process to win,” she says.
Championing Foresight Strategies
It’s very challenging to try to change the whole operating system. Let’s say someone is embedding foresight into the culture of leadership or the planning stages? They’re looking to build the capability and momentum in the organization. Where would you start?
“As a strategist, I will start probably from the beginning and try to understand what the objective is, who the stakeholders are, how many of the stakeholders are actually open to it, is there a champion in the leadership team and so on,” says Lenkova. “Of course, we have to dream big. I’m very much for that. But we also have to pick the steps to win big and dream big. So I would probably start with something that is a strategic initiative that is already in flight and one that is important to senior leaders that will have momentum behind it, that has potentially a champion within that team who is open to applying new methods and who is open to championing foresight.”
She adds, “I would probably think about just four simple questions around it. One would be, what are the assumptions about the future that must hold true for this initiative to succeed? What assumptions are we making when we’re making this five-year strategy? Then what are the early signals or what sort of indicators would show that these assumptions are strengthening or weakening? You have to follow the signals along the way, so it cannot be a one-off exercise. There has to be ongoing monitoring. And then, where in the current governance process would those signals surface and who has both the authority and also the incentive to act on them?”
Making Foresights Impactful
Much of this resonates with market research and insights professionals as well. Having that stakeholder champion, for example. One final question. What takeaway or advice would you give that market research or foresight professional, to make their work more actionable and influential? What’s that mindset shift or practice that you think would make the biggest difference?
“I probably would give different advice to somebody who is just starting to work with foresight,” she says. “Foresight is an excellent extra skill that will be useful as a portfolio of skills for a researcher. It’s a great idea because that way you will develop the ability to both explore and exploit. I think a lot of times, insights professionals are focused on what consumers are saying, what is happening now. It’s so important to use that information and then be able to project it into the future. It’s a smart thing to do if you want to develop in that direction.”
“For a foresight professional, on the other hand, I would probably say stop pitching foresight as an insight and pitch it as a decision quality and use it as a complementary skill with strategy or understanding how organizations work if you will be implementing it in an organization. Theoretically, knowing foresight is just not enough to implement it and make it actionable.”
Editor’s Note: Click here for “From Foresight to Action, Your Strategic Decision-Making Playbook” (Wiley) by Joana Lenkova, available on Amazon Books. (There’s also a 20% off code on Wiley.com with the code FF20.)
