11Feb2025
Leader’s Digest | February 2025
by: Nordic Business Forum
Welcome to the February 2025 edition of the Leader’s Digest, Your monthly guide to business leadership. This time, we’ll explore the topic of foresight.
Contents
- A Beginner’s Guide to Strategic Foresight
- Future-Ready Mindset with April Rinne (Webinar recording)
- How to Connect Strategy and Foresight
- Speaker of the month: Howard Yu
- NBF Future Concept Is Out
- Welcome New Team Leaders!
- Inspirational Quote by Rutger Bregman
New Leadership Insights
A Beginner’s Guide to Strategic Foresight
How can leaders prepare for a future that is constantly shifting? The answer lies in strategic foresight—a powerful approach to identifying emerging risks and opportunities before they fully materialize.
Our friends at Futures Platform not only walked us through how to get started with strategic foresight, but also shared a few useful methods for actually doing it. Here are a few key insights on their expertise:
✅ Foresight is a continuous process. It’s not a one-time exercise. The most future-ready organizations embed it into their strategy and decision-making.
✅ Start small—every advocate counts. Even one passionate person can ignite foresight efforts in an organization. Begin with manageable experiments and build momentum.
✅ Collaboration is essential. Foresight thrives on diverse perspectives. Engaging internal and external stakeholders ensures that future insights remain relevant and actionable.
✅ Use practical tools. Methods like horizon scanning, futures wheel, and scenario planning help organizations visualize potential changes and respond proactively.
✅ Communicate insights effectively. Foresight findings should resonate with stakeholders. Aligning insights with real organizational challenges ensures they drive action, not just discussion.
Want to future-proof your organization? Read the full blog and explore how to implement strategic foresight!
Mastering a Future-Ready Mindset with April Rinne (Webinar Recording)
“The number one leadership quality needed today is comfort with ambiguity.”
– April Rinne
Recently we sat down with futurist and author, April Rinne, to learn how to adopt a future-ready mindset. If you missed the webinar, you can watch the recording or read a written summary on our blog. Enjoy!
How to Connect Strategy and Foresight
In an HBR article, futurist Amy Webb argues that strategy and foresight were once the same discipline but have diverged over time. To reunite strategy and foresight effectively, she suggests to combine quantitative data, predictive modeling, and behavioral insights to create scenarios that inform strategic planning.
In the article, Amy also shares a circular strategic foresight process they use at the Future Today Institute. Here’s how it works:
- Spot Early Signals – Use AI, expert insights, and research to detect emerging changes and to move beyond traditional horizon scanning.
- Identify Trends – Evaluate trends based on momentum, direction, and potential impact using real data like market movements and policy changes.
- Define Macro Themes – Find the bigger themes that shape the future and align them with leadership discussions.
- Address Uncertainties – Categorize unknowns using STREEEP+W (social, technological, regulatory, environmental, economic, ethical, political, and wild cards) to prepare for different possibilities.
- Develop Future Hypotheses – Combine trends and uncertainties to create scenarios, using methods like 2×2 matrices and Monte Carlo simulations to minimize bias.
- Create Scenarios – Tailor research-based scenarios for leaders and teams, ensuring they fit the organization’s culture and decision-making needs.
- Link to Strategy – Use these scenarios in SWOT analysis, test assumptions, and assess your organization’s adaptability.
- Plan for Action – Integrate insights into traditional strategy work—helping with product innovation, M&A, and major business decisions.
- Execute with Alignment – Ensure teams understand and align with the strategy, updating performance metrics as needed.
- Measure and Adapt – Keep monitoring progress, adjust tactics based on real-world feedback, and stay agile in response to new developments.
Amy also highlights that this should be a continuous cycle of strategic foresight—there’s no end to the work. We recommend reading her thorough article to learn more about connecting strategy and foresight!
NBF Spotlight
Join us behind the scenes as we introduce our speakers, share event updates, and more!
Speaker of the Month: Howard Yu
Howard Yu is LEGO® Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School. He leads the Center for Future Readiness, founded in 2020 with support from the LEGO Brand Group, to guide companies through strategic transformation.
Howard has delivered tailored training to several global companies like ABB, Bosch, Novo Nordisk, Electrolux, Heineken, Maersk, and many others. In 2023, he was honored with the Thinkers50 Strategy Award for his substantial contributions to management strategy and future readiness.
At Nordic Business Forum 2025, Howard will talk to us about the principles that make a future-ready organization.
NBF Future Concept Is Out
We piloted NBF Future Tickets last year and wanted to make them available again!
The concept in short offers NBF 2025 ticket holders the chance to bring young talents aged 25 or under to the event at a reduced price. This way, our event guests can empower aspiring leaders with a unique opportunity to learn, connect, and grow.
Read more about the concept on the NBF Future website!
Welcome New Team Leaders!
Every year at the Nordic Business Forum in Helsinki, we welcome over 200 students who guide and assist our event guests. Additionally, we recruit a group of team leaders to train and lead these students both before and during the event. In the months leading up to the event, these team leaders participate in the NBF Leadership Program, which equips them with the skills and knowledge needed for their leadership roles.
Recently, we started this year’s leadership training program, designed to coach and empower 14 Customer Service Team Leaders for the Nordic Business Forum 2025. This team will develop their leadership skills together until September, when they will step into their roles, leading their teams to create an extraordinary customer experience. We are thrilled to have them on board this year! 🫶
Stop and Think
“I wanna make a distinction between optimism and hope. Optimism makes you lazy. Optimism is this feeling that things will turn out to be alright. Hope is the recognition that things can be different—that there is nothing inevitable about the way we structure our society and economy right now. It can all radically change and hope, most importantly, it impels you to act. It impels you to get out of bed in the morning and do something. That’s why I am very much in favor of hope and not so much of optimism.”
– Rutger Bregman
