The Missing Discipline in the Boardroom (Part II): Strategy Without Foresight

In a previous issue of The Foresight Brief, I argued that foresight remains a blind spot in contemporary board governance. A closer reading of Boards of Directors in Disruptive Times: Improving Corporate Governance Effectiveness by Jordi Canals from the IESE Business School reinforces and sharpens this claim.

What becomes evident is not that boards ignore the future. On the contrary, they are increasingly expected to engage with it. The problem is more precise: boards lack a structured discipline for thinking about the future under conditions of uncertainty.

A central theme in Canals’ work is the need for boards to orient themselves toward long-term value creation. Governance is framed not merely as oversight, but as stewardship of the firm’s long-term development.

This shift is both necessary and widely acknowledged. Yet it remains largely normative. The literature specifies that boards should think long term, but provides limited guidance on how such thinking is to be enacted in practice. The future appears as an obligation, not as an object of systematic inquiry.

The strategic role of the board is equally emphasized. Directors are expected to engage with strategy, understand external disruptions, and challenge managerial assumptions. In particular, boards are encouraged to reflect on broad trends and their implications for long-term performance .

This raises a fundamental question: what kind of knowledge about the future is being produced in these discussions?

In practice, most boardrooms rely on a limited repertoire:

• trend analysis and extrapolation

• risk identification frameworks

• periodic strategic reviews

These approaches provide orientation, but they embed a critical assumption—that the future can be understood as a continuation of observable trajectories. Under conditions of disruption, this assumption becomes fragile.

Trend-based approaches implicitly treat uncertainty as manageable. They assume that, with sufficient information, trajectories can be identified and incorporated into strategy.

But contemporary environments are increasingly defined by deep uncertainty—situations in which:

• probabilities are indeterminate

• key variables are unknown

• structural breaks are plausible

In such contexts, extrapolation is insufficient. The future cannot be reduced to trends; it must be explored as a space of multiple, qualitatively different possibilities.

What is particularly striking in Canals’ argument is that the need for a more sophisticated engagement with the future is repeatedly acknowledged—albeit indirectly.

At one point, he writes that boards “should develop their own perspective on the future of the firm in collaboration with the CEO” .

This statement is more consequential than it may initially appear. It implies that the future is not simply observed, but constructed through interpretation and dialogue. And yet, the methodological implications remain unexplored. How is such a perspective developed? Through what processes is it challenged? The conceptual need for foresight is visible. The discipline itself is not.

This gap is reinforced by the enduring weight of compliance within board practice. Even as the strategic role of boards is emphasized, much of their institutional design remains oriented toward monitoring and accountability.

As the book notes, a compliance-heavy focus may not be sufficient to ensure long-term development .

What emerges is a structural imbalance:

• compliance is backward-looking

• strategy is forward-looking

• but the capability to deal with uncertainty is underdeveloped

Without that capability, the forward-looking dimension of governance remains incomplete.

Taken together, these observations suggest a reframing of the board’s role. Beyond its formal responsibilities, the board can be understood as a collective cognitive institution tasked with making sense of the firm’s future.

This reframing shifts attention from structure to capability. Governance effectiveness is not only a matter of composition or incentives, but also of how boards think.

Foresight provides the methodological infrastructure required to operationalize long-term thinking. It enables boards to move beyond linear projections and engage with uncertainty in a structured way.

In practical terms, this implies a shift:

• from trend discussion to exploration of multiple futures

• from risk registers to uncertainty mapping

• from validating strategy to stress-testing underlying assumptions

Without such practices, long-term orientation risks remaining intuitive, fragmented, and insufficiently challenged.

The call for boards to develop a perspective on the future is both necessary and insufficient. A perspective, in the absence of method, remains vulnerable to bias and overconfidence.

What is required is a shift from having a view of the future to systematically exploring multiple possible futures.

This is where foresight enters—not as an abstract idea, but as a practical discipline.