Foresight and Futures, Business Resiliency

Services Overview

While the future can’t be predicted, it must be prepared for. Yet too often a cultural and operational chasm divides today’s organizations between those who live in the promise of the future versus those who choose the certainty of the present.

This gap won’t close on its own; rather, it demands a new business capability.

Foresight & Futures enables leaders to pressure-test and evolve current strategies, investments, and innovations so they can operationalize the future today. At SQA Group, we help organizations harness the power of signal unearthing, pattern sensing, and human-centered design to prepare for multiple possible futures — accounting for industry disruption, emerging technologies, and new ways of working.

Because in a post-normal world defined by constant change, long-term endurance is determined by those who are ready to adapt, no matter which future arrives.

Helping leaders who need to

Stress-test strategies before committing capital and resources
Leapfrog competitors to establish market and category leadership
Overcome bias, assumptions, and beliefs to see what else is possible
Shift today’s world to ‘run’ mode to gain bandwidth to focus on tomorrow

Reduce risk exposure and threat by creating multiple hedging pathways
Combat “future shock” to alleviate disorientation, fear, and paralysis
Unlock non-obvious growth opportunities that others fail to see
Position futures and foresight as an organizational immune system

From Our Team

"In a Future of Work landscape, leadership advantage is no longer rooted in pedigree or domain mastery. Instead, it belongs to those who can see, envision, and map multiple possible futures — from the expected to the provocative — ensuring their organizations and teams are prepared to thrive, no matter what unfolds.”

Carrie Majewski, SQA Group Chief Growth & Innovation Officer, Certified Foresight Practitioner

Core service capabilities include...

Business Model Innovation

In a world rife with shifts — democratization of information, leapfrogging prioritized over modernization, elimination of time as the measure of productivity, etc. — how businesses create, distribute, and sustain value has fundamentally changed. To successfully service the customer, employee, investor, and partner of the future, companies must confront archaic operating models and yesterday’s assumptions to stand up innovative-first models that drive long-term viability. Through ethnography, mental simulation, and STEEP scanning, SQA Group helps executives supercharge competitive advantage.

Viability and Threat Stress-Testing

Imagine a world in which you no longer have a proprietary advantage; platform dependency locks you out of your own customers; pricing collapses, eroding margins beyond recovery. Instead of viewing these as hypotheticals, future-focused companies use these as stress tests that serve as the springboard for true business resiliency. Through degradation and risk modeling, we help organizations identify the conditions under which their operating model breaks, the predicted deadline for when the break will happen, and the preventative measures to take now to reduce the speed and impact of the break.

Scenario Modeling and Forecasting

We help you explore multiple futures at once — from the preferred future you most desire to what you need to know about a potential collapse future for your organization, industry, department, etc. Through proven scenario frameworks (e.g. the Cone of Possibilities, Probability Impact Matrix, Futures Wheels, etc.), simulation technologies, and design thinking and world-building, we help organizations catapult to the future to determine the today actions that are needed to stave off future risk and drive untapped opportunity.

Unexpected Signal Convergence

Today, organizations largely scan by assessing and responding to what is happening inside, outside and around the business. But if a signal is already visible, it’s too late. We invite leaders to spot the unexpected signal convergence — the signals that don’t seemingly connect that illuminate the core change fueling them all (new technology, competitive disruption, societal belief shifts, etc.). With unexpected drivers of change known, companies can stop catching up to their industry and instead strive for market dominance by unlocking new opportunities for innovation and value creation well before they arrive.

Foresight & Futures as an Always-On Capability

When treated as a one-off initiative or isolated to an individual or team, Foresight & Futures fails to reach its transformative potential. But when activated as org-wide connective tissue, it powerfully informs investment decisions, customer acquisition, hiring priorities, and broader methodologies. SQA Group helps companies embed Foresight & Futures as an always-on capability — from Fractional Future Officer leadership to Innovation Think Tanks to Cognitive Restructuring Trainings to internal Cohort Programs. Each designed to ensure that foresight becomes a built-in resiliency discipline.

Additional Resources

Ideation as a Leadership Skill

Grab tips and tricks for establishing a space for team ideation and incubation

Read the Blog

10 KPIs for the Future-First Exec

An award-winning resource with groundbreaking metrics once deemed immeasurable

Download Now

When Change and Culture Collide

To drive teams to the future, we need to survive the messy middle of change

Dive In

Foresight & Futures Activation