Scenario Planning & Strategic Foresight speakers
Speakers who help organisations anticipate uncertainty, stress-test assumptions and plan for multiple futures
Speakers Associates represents 257 speakers on Scenario Planning & Strategic Foresight, including Michael Beckley, Kemal Apaydin, Peter Fisk, Mark Stevenson, Olivier Sibony, Thimon de Jong, Lucy Bullivant, Rita McGrath, Katja Schipperheijn and Graeme Codrington.
Most large companies can run innovation labs. Few can turn them into commercial advantage. The gap between emerging technology and a working operating model is where boards lose ground to faster competitors.
Organisations making commitments on energy transition and supply chain sustainability cannot afford to treat China as a black box – yet most lack any reliable way to read Chinese government priorities, policy signals, or green innovation trajectories with operational precision. The result is strategy built on assumption: either over-reading China’s stated commitments or underestimating the scale and pace of what is actually being implemented at city and provincial level. For boards navigating ESG exposure, partner risk, and long-term energy strategy, this blind spot has material consequences.
Most boards struggle to separate technological hype from technological reality. They invest heavily in fashionable platforms that fade, and miss the engineering signals that reshape an industry years in advance. The cost of that misjudgement is rising as AI, cybersecurity and connectivity converge.
Most leadership teams plan in linear increments while the technologies reshaping their industry compound exponentially. The gap between the speed of internal decision making and the speed of external change is where incumbents lose. The question is no longer whether to act on AI, robotics, biotech and space, but how to redesign the operating model so the organisation can place serious bets without breaking itself.
Growth is getting harder in the markets most companies were built for. The instinct is to optimise what already works, sharpening the brand and pushing harder on the existing playbook. The more difficult question is what to build instead, and most leadership teams lack a shared framework for answering it.
Three assumptions have underpinned Western business strategy for thirty years: American dominance, rules-based trade and stable energy markets. All three are now unreliable, and most boardrooms are still treating the consequences as disruptions to manage quarter by quarter. Organisations making ten-year decisions need a way of reading the world that outlasts the news cycle.
Most large organisations are built to deliver predictable results. That design becomes a liability when disruption is the operating climate rather than a passing storm. Budget cycles, governance structures, and executive incentives all protect today’s business model, often at the direct expense of the next one. The companies that get displaced are rarely short of resources. They are short of the architecture to reinvent continuously while still running the core.
Most leadership teams are not short of AI commentary. They are short of conviction about what to do with it. The harder question is which signals warrant a budget shift this year and which are noise dressed up as strategy.
Boards are being asked to take real positions on geopolitics, sanctions exposure, hostile-state cyber risk and supply-chain dependencies that used to be someone else’s problem. Most do not have an intelligence-grade read on what is actually changing, or how fast. The gap between corporate risk registers and the picture inside national security briefings is widening, and the cost of getting it wrong is no longer theoretical.
Most digital transformation programmes stall in the gap between strategy decks and operating reality. The harder question is sovereignty: who controls the code, the infrastructure, the talent pipeline, and the standards your business now depends on. Boards rarely have a credible internal voice that can speak to both the technology stack and the policy machinery around it.
Boards used to treat geopolitics as a tail risk that the strategy team would brief on once a year. That model is over. Capital allocation, supply chains, currency exposure, energy procurement and sovereign-customer relationships now shift on the back of decisions made in Washington, Beijing, Moscow and Brussels, and most leadership teams do not have the in-house literacy to read those decisions in time.
Most organisations treat global economic disruption as a forecasting problem – something that better data or faster analysis will solve. It isn’t. The structural imbalances that produce financial crises and political instability build slowly, in plain sight, and are routinely dismissed until they cannot be. Boards that conflate cyclical volatility with structural fault lines make capital allocation, market entry, and risk decisions on the wrong basis – and find out only when the correction arrives.