Foresight-Driven Enterprise Design for Architects building what's next.

This newsletter is about making good decisions when the future is unclear.

It’s for people who lead organisations and who want to be as deliberate with their own thinking as they are with their teams. The promise is practical: better decisions under uncertain conditions, and the structure to act on them once they are made.

3 things will help you get more out of what follows.

Hold the ideas loosely. Treat what you read here as mental models, as ways of working through a problem rather than the final word on it. New models turn up all the time. The good ones will add to what you find here rather than replace it.

Know the focus. It all centres on building the foresight-driven enterprise. I take the definition from enterprise.design, where an enterprise is “an endeavour of people with a shared ambition”. A foresight-driven one does more than react to change once it arrives. It uses structured foresight to shape its own future, and to make sounder decisions while the ground is still shifting.

Know who is writing. I am a strategist and a storyteller with a background in enterprise architecture and strategy. For years I have helped leaders design the systems their organisations run on, and shape the stories that get people to back a change. Both halves matter, because a design nobody believes in never gets built.

You will notice I mostly stay away from the word “futurist”. It has been worn thin by hype, and I would rather keep a line between wearing the title and doing the thinking. My job is to put that thinking to work alongside the discipline of strategic planning and enterprise design. The researchers and practitioners who built these fields have my respect, and the work here stands on theirs.

If that is the kind of thinking you want in your inbox, you are in the right place.