Extremes are no longer outliers. They have moved from rare disruptions to everyday conditions. People and companies are living with these extremes and have to adapt quickly to a changing world.
“In this environment, traditional strategic planning becomes increasingly fragile. Leaders are making decisions within systems that are volatile, interconnected, and often contradictory,” said Manoj Kothari, Founder and Chief Strategist at Turian Labs, a Pune-based strategic foresight, design research, and innovation consulting firm.
Strategic foresight is being viewed as a way to help identify emerging signals, explore multiple plausible futures, and help leaders make better decisions under uncertainty. “It is not about predicting the future. It is about improving the quality of interpretation that shapes decisions today,” Kothari said.
Strategic Foresight practice is taking off in the country. “Organisations have more data than ever before. The challenge is interpretation. Assumptions about people, markets, technologies, and systems can become outdated long before they are visibly challenged,” he said.
The Tata Group and Aditya Birla Group are among the first movers in this space. TCS has a team of people working on strategic foresight. All Indian automotive OEMs have trend researchers. Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Renault have advanced research teams mapping societal changes that could impact future products. Samsung has a Product Innovation Team that tracks broader societal shifts to decide future product innovation.
Swiggy and Hotstar use it to track the future of food and entertainment. IIT Jodhpur has a dedicated Centre for Technology Foresight and Policy (CTFP), established in January 2020. “However, these are largely isolated efforts. India has examples of foresight practice, but not yet a connected foresight ecosystem,” Kothari said.
But it is gaining traction as companies grapple with changes. The challenge is not the pace of change alone, but a collision of multiple shifts unfolding simultaneously as we are living through a period of compounding transitions, Kothari said.
Turian is convening a global foresight and insight summit, CrossDive, in Pune on October 22 and 23 with foresight practitioners, business leaders, founders, researchers and policymakers exploring how India and Indian businesses should navigate a world of competing powers, sovereign technologies and shifting alliances and what India should build over the next decade.
“Geopolitical realignments are reshaping trade, technology, energy, and supply chains. AI is advancing faster than institutions can adapt. Economic assumptions that guided decision-making are being challenged. Technology now diffuses through society in days rather than years, compressing the time available to respond,” points out Kothari.
“India’s competitive advantage may lie not in predicting the future, but in becoming better prepared for whichever future arrives,” Kothari said.