Forget Foresight, it’s time for Foreshape.

Why every organisation now needs a prototyping culture.

While you were reading this sentence, three new AI models launched, a climate tipping point shifted somewhere in the Arctic, and Gen Z redefined yet another industry expectation; this is the pace we’re operating at now.

If you’re not actively shaping the future, the future is shaping you.

Knowing isn’t doing.

Remember when Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, then buried it to protect film sales? Or when Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million and walked away laughing?

They had foresight. They saw what was coming, but seeing isn't enough anymore.

For decades, the future was something you researched. You gathered trends like butterflies, pinned them to boards, and presented them in glossy reports. You commissioned horizon scans that read like science fiction. You sat through scenario workshops where the biggest risk was running out of Post-it notes. That approach doesn’t hold up anymore.

We’re not looking ahead to the future, we’re inside it.

And that changes everything.

From Foresight to Foreshape: the great acceleration.

The pace, scale, and interdependence of global shifts have collapsed the distance between "planning" and "panic mode." We're living in a polycrisis of climate acceleration, AI transformation, demographic inversion, trust erosion, and resource scarcity. All happening simultaneously, all feeding each other.

These aren’t just trends you can place on a timeline, they’re overlapping transitions that reshape reality while you're still scheduling the strategy retreat.

So we need a different kind of strategy. Not one that asks what’s coming, but one that focuses on what we need to shift right now to stay relevant. This is where foreshape comes in.

Foreshape is about doing exactly that. It's not about predicting. It means designing tools, behaviours, systems, and cultures that are future-fit by virtue of being adaptable.

Think of it as applied futures rather than theoretical ones.

Stop planning for the future, start prototyping it.

Picture this: It's Monday morning. Your leadership team gathers around a conference table laden with thick strategy documents, each one representing months of analysis, dozens of meetings, and the collective wisdom of expensive consultants.

By Thursday, three of your key assumptions have been invalidated by market reality.

Most organisations are still trying to think their way into the future. Thinking isn’t always enough, you need to build your way there.

This is why prototyping is now a strategic capability, not a UX afterthought.

In a prototyping culture:

Ideas don't wait for approval committees. They get tested within days, not quarters.

Failure isn't feared. It's folded into the learning loop like ingredients in a recipe.

Strategy lives in what you actually try, not what you elegantly articulate.

Innovation isn't trapped in labs. It's systemic, participatory, and happening everywhere.

Think of prototyping as the R&D of organisational transformation. It's how you find new models before old ones fail. It's how you avoid becoming another cautionary tale in some future MBA case study.

The future isn’t waiting for you to catch-up.

Most leadership still works in a way that separates strategy from execution. Plans live in slides. Innovation lives in silos.

Meanwhile, the future arrives uninvited through:

Customers who expect experiences you haven't designed yet

Technologies that make your core competencies irrelevant overnight

Regulations that rewrite your business model while you sleep

Environmental constraints that transform entire supply chains

Generational shifts that flip your value propositions upside down

The organisations that adapt will be the ones that learn quickly and act faster. Not the ones with the neatest plan.

Prototyping helps you build that agility.

Foresight was about seeing, Foreshape is about doing.

In a world shaped by AI acceleration, climate transition, and cascading uncertainty, the most resilient organisations will be those who treat the future not as a forecast to predict, but as a design brief to prototype.

This is the invitation: Stop preparing for the future. Start preparing into it.

Move beyond strategic theatre and into applied futures. Rethink your incentives to reward fast learning over slow certainty. Redesign your processes to prototype possibilities rather than perfect plans. And make experimentation not a special project, but the way you breathe as an organisation.

The future’s here- and it’s ready for you to shape it.