Anticipating the Future: A New Imperative for Business

Businesses, both large and small, have mastered the art of reacting and responding, managing crises, executing strategies at a high level, and maintaining lean and agile operations. However, these skills have proven insufficient in preventing massive monetary and brand losses, even for Fortune 500 companies. Case in point, Alphabet recently experienced a $100 billion loss when its profitable search business was outpaced by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s clear that agility isn’t enough in our era of exponential change!

The key to thriving amid hyper-change and growing uncertainty is developing a new competency: the ability to accurately anticipate the future. This may sound impossible, but the future is visible if you know how to look for it.

I call organizations that have mastered this skill “Anticipatory Organizations.” Three decades of my research into Hard Trends and Soft Trends has contributed to developing this concept.

Hard Trends and Soft Trends: Understanding the Distinction

Hard Trends are projections based on measurable, tangible, and fully predictable facts, events…