Getting from Daily Grind to Future Resilience
Developing Foresight and Adaptability in Your Business
In today's dynamic business environment, leaders often find themselves absorbed by the day to day demands of operations with little bandwidth for long-term strategic planning. Yet, developing foresight and adaptability is paramount for navigating an increasingly complex and uncertain world, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. Now is not the time for business as usual. The ability to look ahead and prepare for future shifts is not just an advantage; it's essential for sustained growth and survival.
If You’re Not, Your Competitors Certainly Are
Let’s face it, from the largest to the smallest business there are challenges and opportunities to be met in the current business environment. It’s those businesses who are coming to grips with change and adapting to address what they can that will thrive. In their guidance to multinationals facing the same challenges, McKinsey1 recommended a number of approaches, depending upon the company circumstances:
Drive commercial acceleration and invest in growth.
Capture market share and protect margins.
Invest to reset the cost structure.
Rationalise and refocus.
These are just as relevant to small and medium sized businesses and reflect approaches that consider the context of the company and finding ways to control or manage the circumstances to your advantage. You and your team need to look at more than just the day to day operations so that you can stay ahead of the competition and meet the continual headwinds. This requires, in most cases, a change in mindset. How do you achieve this?
Three Horizons - Futures Exploration
One powerful framework that helps teams structure their thinking about the future is the Three Horizons methodology, popularised by Bill Sharpe. This approach provides a clear lens through which to view and manage change across different timeframes:
Horizon 1 (H1): The Present. This represents your core business, products, and services – the "business as usual" operations that generate current revenue. The focus here is on optimising and sustaining what already exists.
Horizon 2 (H2): Transitional Innovations. These are emerging initiatives designed to address the limitations of H1 or to capitalise on new opportunities. H2 bridges the gap between your current state and a desired future, often involving new ventures or modifications to existing models.
Horizon 3 (H3): The Desired Future. This horizon embodies a visionary, often transformative, future state for your business or industry. It encourages imagining entirely new ways of operating, unconstrained by present challenges.
The power of Three Horizons lies in its ability to foster organisational ambidexterity – the capacity to excel at current operations (exploitation) while simultaneously exploring new opportunities for the future (exploration). Bill Sharpe's book, "Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope"2, provides a comprehensive guide to applying this framework for strategic foresight and managing change. (Note, I mentioned McKinsey above, I don’t recommend their take on Three Horizons.) You can find more information on the framework through resources like H3Uni (h3uni.org), including extensive facilitation guides.
Breaking New Ground - Six Thinking Hats
However, while Three Horizons offers a macroscopic view, fostering adaptability and innovation also requires practical, hands-on tools for your teams and this is best led by experienced facilitators. For those new to structured futures thinking, or seeking a more contained approach to brainstorming and problem-solving, Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats3 provides an excellent starting point to engage a team in a different way of tackling problems, as a starting point to tackling larger challenges.
The Six Thinking Hats system encourages parallel thinking, allowing teams to explore a subject from six distinct perspectives, one at a time, preventing chaotic discussions and ensuring all angles are considered:
White Hat: Focus on facts, figures, and objective information.
Red Hat: Express emotions, feelings, and intuition without justification.
Black Hat: Identify risks, potential problems, and criticisms.
Yellow Hat: Explore benefits, advantages, and positive possibilities.
Green Hat: Generate new ideas, alternatives, and creative solutions.
Blue Hat: Manage the thinking process, set the agenda, and summarise conclusions.
By adopting a structured approach like the Six Thinking Hats, teams can ensure that discussions are more focused and comprehensive. This method effectively incorporates diverse voices and perspectives into the creative process, encouraging quieter members to contribute and preventing dominant opinions from stifling innovation. As author and speaker Stephen Covey is quoted as saying, "Strength lies in differences, not in similarities."
While the Six Thinking Hats doesn't provide the overarching strategic language or methodological depth to drive a full cultural transformation in how a business approaches futures exploration like the Three Horizons framework, it is an incredibly effective and accessible tool. It gives teams a concrete way to practice structured collaborative thinking, spark new ideas, and build a foundation for greater agility and resilience within daily operations. This practical application can demonstrate the immediate benefits of focused innovation, paving the way for a deeper integration of strategic foresight into your business's DNA.
Tariffs and global trade: The economic impact on business (McKinsey, 2025)
Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope (2nd Ed.) (Sharpe, 2020)
Six Thinking Hats (de Bono, 2000)