Frequently we get the question, how far an organization should be looking ahead to be future oriented and build a resilience against discontinuous change.
In our benchmarking study we found that most companies look into the short and medium term future. Some companies have even a division of labour between the corporate and operational units. Where operational units have corporate foresight activities that cover 1-5 years and corporate units cover 5 – 15 years. Some companies had even activities that aimed to go beyond the 15 year frame, but we found no regular activity that went beyond 30 years.
This might seem surprising as long term technology development, such as nuclear fusion or quantum computing have clearly time horizons beyond 30 years. Thus we would expect that companies developing such technologies would need to start to explore potential markets, customer needs and political issues.
In a master thesis project Matthias Völcker found that long time horizons are rare, particularly because their predictive capacity is perceived to be too low to provide a sufficient basis for business planning.
In our recent poll we would like to know which time horizons are targeted by your foresight activities. We would be also very keen to learn more about any examples of foresight activities that go beyond 30 years. To share such examples you can leave us a comment to this post.
The results of our old polls can be found in our poll archive.