Leading Through Disruption: Three Practical Ways to Build Foresight Into Everyday Decision-Making
In today’s business environment, uncertainty is no longer an occasional disruption; it is the operating condition. A survey earlier this year by The Conference Board found that uncertainty is now the top economic concern for U.S. CEOs. For leaders, uncertainty creates a difficult challenge: how do you make decisions when the future feels unstable, technology is evolving faster than planning cycles, and traditional playbooks no longer fit?
A recent Michigan Ross Executive Education webinar welcomed futurists and strategy leaders Sabrina Sullivan, Linh Phillips, and Nina Maturu, who argued that the answer is not prediction, but rather foresight: a leadership discipline built around preparing for multiple plausible futures rather than relying on a single expected outcome.
Their discussion surfaced three practical leadership themes that matter increasingly to decision makers.
Treat Uncertainty as a Strategic Signal, Not a Threat
Many organizations respond to uncertainty defensively, treating volatility as something to survive rather than something to learn from. Sabrina Sullivan, a corporate futurist, strategist, and advisor with more than 15 years of experience driving transformation across Fortune 500 companies, government, higher education, nonprofits, and high-growth ventures, challenged that instinct directly: “We vilify the word uncertainty, but we often forget that uncertainty is the environment in which you can get differentiated value.” Her point reframes uncertainty not as a flaw in the market but as the condition in which new opportunities emerge.
Linh Phillips, who leads consumer insights and strategic foresight at Nestlé, added that leaders now face a choice: remain reactive, or actively convert disruption into advantage. “You could either look at it as just headwinds to your business…or you can treat it as an opportunity in the landscape. How do we convert all of those headwinds into tailwinds that we can take strategic action on?”
For leaders, that means replacing the question “How do we avoid being wrong?” with “What possibilities do we need to be ready for?”
What Leaders Can Do Now:
- Build planning conversations around multiple scenarios, not one forecast
- Ask teams what assumptions would fail under different future conditions
- Treat volatility as a recurring leadership input, not an exception
Build Foresight as a Leadership Capability, Not a Specialized Function
Foresight should not be isolated to innovation teams or strategy departments. Phillips described how this work has shifted inside organizations: “It’s becoming more normalized, it’s becoming more operationalized…It’s actually becoming a core competency and a leadership capability.” That matters because many leaders still confuse foresight with trend reports or forecasting. Nina Maturu, an award-winning innovation executive and strategic advisor with two decades of experience transforming organizations and identifying new growth opportunities, made the distinction clearly: “Forecasting is based on past data, and foresight is based on future data.”
Forecasting assumes patterns continue. Foresight asks what happens when patterns break. This becomes especially important with AI, where historical data alone often fails to explain what comes next. As Maturu noted, organizations discussing generative AI today may already be behind if they are not thinking several stages ahead. “Our strategic plans can’t just talk about generative AI. They need to be talking about three steps ahead of AI.”
Sullivan emphasized that leaders do not need to become futurists themselves, but they do need to understand how to lead in ways that allow foresight to work. “I don’t think leaders need to be futurists…but what a leader looks like going forward might look very different than even some of those leadership frameworks that come from our favorite books.”
What Leaders Can Do Now:
- Make future-thinking part of routine decision meetings
- Invite outside expertise when signals are unclear
- Train managers to ask, “What if this changes faster than expected?”
Encourage Curiosity and Challenge Assumptions Early
Across the discussion, one idea came up repeatedly: foresight is not an individual leadership trait, but rather it works best when teams think together. Phillips described one of the most important habits simply: “One of the biggest leadership [capabilities] is curiosity, relentless curiosity, to make sure you’re continuously asking what if.”
Curiosity matters because organizations often miss change signals, not because information is absent, but because teams are too focused on immediate pressures. Sullivan explained that future-ready leaders often challenge assumptions even when uncomfortable: “They’re very healthy provocateurs of the status quo… they’re questioning it… they’re embracing multiple futures.”
This behavior becomes especially important when morale is low or uncertainty creates fear. Leaders who can articulate a credible positive direction help teams stay engaged rather than retreating into caution. As Sullivan explained, “These leaders are taking the learnings from foresight and saying, How do I imagine and articulate a vision toward positive futures?”
At the close of the webinar, Nina Maturu connected this behavior directly to the emotional realities leaders are facing: “We’re fearful of the future because we don’t know what the future holds, right? And that’s a very human emotion…and strategic foresight is actually a way to deal with that sense of fear.”
What Leaders Can Do Now:
- Protect time for long-term thinking even during operational pressure
- Encourage dissenting perspectives during planning
- Use future scenarios to create shared confidence rather than fear
Why Does Foresight Matter More Now?
The webinar’s most consistent message is that foresight is no longer optional for senior leaders. Rather than treating uncertainty as a temporary disruption to manage through, panelists emphasized that leaders must learn to operate within it continuously. Organizations that build this mindset early are often the ones that move faster when disruption arrives, not because they predicted perfectly, but because they rehearsed possibilities in advance and prepared for multiple outcomes. As Phillips put it: “The future is something that we don’t predict, it’s something that we provoke.”
As uncertainty remains a defining feature of the operating environment rather than an occasional disruption, organizations are placing greater value on leaders who can combine strategic discipline with long-range thinking. Programs through Michigan Ross Executive Education increasingly focus on helping executives strengthen those capabilities, developing the judgment, adaptability, and foresight needed to lead when familiar assumptions no longer hold.
The full webinar recording is available to watch now at the link below.
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Lead confidently through uncertainty and shift from short-term reactions to proactive, foresight-driven strategy, and build organizational resilience in this new hybrid, blended learning program from Michigan Ross Executive Education.
