The SME Blind Spot

Here’s an uncomfortable number: SMEs make up more than 90% of the world’s businesses. Here’s an equally uncomfortable number: almost everything we know about corporate foresight comes from studying the other 10%.

That’s not an exaggeration. When my colleagues Ulrike-Sabine Dörr, Gerhard Schönhofer and I went looking for what the academic literature actually says about foresight in small and medium enterprises, the honest answer was: not much, and what exists doesn’t fit together. Large corporations get dedicated foresight units, longitudinal benchmarking studies, and a fifty-year research tradition. SMEs get “no findings” — literally the phrase that kept showing up in our review, table after table. Strategic planning? No findings. Organizational change? No findings. Profitability outcomes? No findings.

This isn’t because SMEs don’t think about the future. It’s because the field built its toolbox for companies with dedicated strategy departments, then quietly assumed everyone else could just use a smaller version of the same tools. They can’t. An SME with 20 employees and one with 200 are both “SMEs” by the official definition, and treating them as the same analytical category gets you nowhere.

So what does foresight actually look like when you strip away the dedicated departments, the corporate foresight units, the multi-year scenario programs?

A recent paper by Matthew Spaniol, Nicholas Rowland and Troels Behrenthz Andersen gives one of the most vivid answers I’ve seen. It follows a Danish government-backed initiative that put scenario planning into more than 80 SMEs over two years — over 1,000 consultancy hours, 400+ scenarios, real companies under real pressure. And what emerges isn’t a methodology story. It’s a *roles* story.

The authors trace a recognizable arc. It usually starts with someone — a procurement officer, a sales manager, sometimes the owner — who made one good call. Maybe they flagged a supplier risk that turned out to be real, or warned that a customer’s payment problems were a leading indicator. They were right, and suddenly they’re the company oracle. The authors call this the “I told you so!” trap, and it’s a trap precisely because being right once creates an expectation of being right always. Nobody can deliver on that, which is exactly the moment scenario work becomes useful — not as a prediction tool, but as a way of distributing the burden of thinking about the future across a process rather than a person.

From there, the strategist becomes a “scenarist” — learning to adapt scenarios to the firm’s actual situation. Then, almost inevitably, an “irritator” — because once a scenario reveals that your entire production capacity depends on one supplier who considers you 0.5% of their annual turnover, that knowledge doesn’t go away. One consultant in the study put it bluntly after a cybersecurity scenario exercise: management suddenly realized their ID badges wouldn’t work, their phones might be compromised, and IT alone couldn’t fix any of it. “Can I see that in writing?” the consultant asked. That’s the irritator stage working as intended.

The roles that follow — integrator, then actor, with managers correspondingly shifting from listener to collaborator to delegator to decider to enabler — describe something I think is the real finding here: foresight in SMEs isn’t a deliverable. It’s a renegotiation of who gets to talk about the future, and under what authority. The existing three-year strategic plan, the paper notes, behaves like “a hidden voice in the room” — already decided, not up for discussion, a drag on everything that doesn’t fit its existing language. Getting new thinking into an SME often means smuggling it in as a “logical extension” of a plan that was written before anyone knew what was coming.

This is, I’d argue, the actual SME foresight problem. Not a lack of tools — the field has toolboxes coming out of its ears. The problem is that foresight in a small organization is inseparable from the social dynamics of who gets to say something about the future and have it matter.

If you’re working with SMEs on this — as a consultant, an intermediary, or from inside one — this has a practical upshot. We built the Zukunftsnavigator with exactly this in mind: a tool that doesn’t require a foresight department or a six-figure consulting engagement, but that still creates the structured space for the “irritator” conversations to happen productively rather than defensively. It’s German-language only for now, but the underlying logic — give smaller organizations a low-threshold way to have these conversations on their own terms — travels well beyond Germany, and I think it’s a useful reference point for what an SME-appropriate intervention can look like.

The bigger point stands regardless of tooling: we are flying blind on 90% of the economy. If you’re doing work in this space — academic, consulting, or inside an SME trying to figure out what comes next — I’d genuinely like to hear what you’re seeing. The research agenda is wide open, which is either a problem or an opportunity depending on how you’re built.