The Imagination Problem of Foresight

(and why it matters more than ever)

We like to tell ourselves that the futures are open, that imagination is abundant, that the problem is simply that people do not look far enough ahead. Yet every time I work with organizations, every time I watch the grand theatre of strategic foresight on stages and conference panels, every time I read glossy reports full of trends and possibilities, I am struck by the same quiet truth. Imagination may be celebrated as an asset, but it is not structurally connected to how decisions are made. And when imagination is not connected to decisions it becomes spectacle. It becomes inspiration without consequence. It becomes a performance of futures rather than a practice of it.

Over the past weeks I have been circling around one idea from different angles. I wrote about decisions that age because reality keeps moving while the decisions that were once good begin to drift out of phase with the world they were meant to shape. I wrote about anticipation as the deeper layer beneath adaptation because no system can adapt well if it does not sense the horizon with enough clarity to understand what it is adapting to. I wrote about the illusion that five years represent a meaningful planning horizon in a world where pressures build, information accumulates and uncertainty thickens faster than our organizational rhythms can process. These pieces were fragments of a larger thought that now feels ready to be stated plainly. Strategic foresight has become an aesthetic. A performance. A theatre of vision. And while this theatre has its value, especially for the collective imagination, it does not yet transform how choices are made.

But when the curtain falls, the future disappears.