The allure of New Year predictions is like catnip for business leaders. And who can blame them? In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, managers constantly seek ways to stay ahead of the curve. But the truth is, no one truly knows what lies around the corner, as evidenced by the fact that far too often, most predictions don’t pan out. However, despite the incredulous nature of predictive forecasting, the desire to do so has inspired a more worthy endeavor: foresight.
For the uninitiated, foresight is a strategic planning approach where organizations gather intelligence about possible futures in an effort to construct longer-term visions for the business. Unlike traditional forecasting, foresight doesn’t aim to predict a single, definitive future like predicting next quarter’s sales or the rise of the metaverse. Instead, foresight explores multiple possible scenarios, helping leaders confidently navigate the uncertainty of a dynamic marketplace.
But that’s not the only difference between predictive forecasts and foresight. Forecasting is predicated on the notion that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior—an idea attributed to many scholars, from Albert Ellis to Walter Michel and B.F. Skinner. This ideology puts a disproportionate focus on what people have done to get a sense of what they will do.
Considering contemporary leaders’ insatiable appetite for—and seemingly endless access to—data, forecasting through predictive analytics makes for a compelling proposition. I mean, who wouldn’t want the advantages that a glimpse into the future could provide, especially if you’re already spending a small fortune on the data that supposedly makes this possible? Am I right?
On the other hand, foresight offers a richer, more contextualized understanding of the present to better navigate the possibilities of the future. Foresight involves a nuanced approach of scanning the horizon for emerging trends, analyzing potential scenarios, and considering the implications of various outcomes based on our comprehension of today’s cultural orthodoxies. Forecasting focuses on the past to see the future; foresight relies on its ability to contextualize the present to prepare for a range of future possibilities. That may seem like hairsplitting, but the difference is significant.
Take Pinterest, for example. The visual discovery platform released its annual Pinterest Predicts report earlier this month, an exploration into the emerging trends for the upcoming year. According to a LinkedIn post from the global chief marketing and communications officer at Pinterest, Andréa Mallard, 80% of Pinterest’s predictions over the past five years have come true. That’s impressive. But what’s the secret behind their uncanny accuracy? It’s not magic—it’s an understanding of culture.
Pinterest Predicts leverages billions of Pinterest search inquiries to spot emerging patterns across the platform. This use of historical data would be enough to forecast a prediction of the future. But the Pinterest report doesn’t stop there; it curates these patterns into trends and actively collaborates with people to better understand how an inclusive community interprets these trends. That is to say, Pinterest captures a wealth of data and culturally translates it into something more meaningful.
From this methodology, Pinterest produces twenty future trends that provide twenty different possibilities for what lies around the corner. The plurality of this endeavor shifts the mindset of managers from a singular prediction—a big bet, if you will—to a multiverse of potential realities based on a deep cultural understanding of the present. Pinterest may call them “predictions,” but in fact, they are (by definition) foresights.
Essentially, foresight transforms the manager’s role from fortune-teller to cultural anthropologist, decoding the complex tapestry of the present to guide the brand through the ever-changing business environment of tomorrow. Here, the goal isn’t to predict the future accurately because that is an erroneous ambition—as articulated by Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan theory, which argues that the most impactful events are hardly ever predictable. Rather, the ambition is to glean a rich enough understanding of the present to prepare for multiple potential outcomes.
This reframe subverts our reliance on historical data alone and introduces cultural insight as a mediator to see different permutations of what could be. The key to doing so is moving beyond thinking about people as data points and seeing them as cultural beings shaped by shared experiences, beliefs, and social conventions. Seeing them as such illuminates the peculiar nuances of social living and mitigates the hubris that managers can reduce their dynamism into the singularity of a forecast.
As we move into another year of what will surely present increasing complexities and fragmentations in the marketplace, the ability to anticipate and navigate cultural shifts will become even more challenging for business leaders (that’s not a prediction, by the way). Those who can successfully blend the insights extracted from historical data with a keen sense of cultural intelligence will find themselves not trying to predict future trends as much as they are actively trying to shape the cultural conversations of tomorrow.
As the late great management scholar Peter Drucker once postulated, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” With foresight, we are better equipped to do just that, starting with a profound understanding of the here and now.