Live strategic challenge
Throughout the programme, you'll work on a live strategic challenge from your own organisation, applying proven foresight frameworks to one of the defining decisions that will shape its future.
Red & Yellow
Executive Education · Strategy
Strategic Foresight for Leaders
Past success is one of strategy's greatest strengths. It can also become its greatest blind spot.
- Duration
- 7 weeks
- Hours per week
- 6-7 hours
- Access
- Online
- Start date
- 01 Mar 2027
- Price
- R27 000
- Qualification
- Red & Yellow Certificate of Completion
Why Strategic Foresight for Leaders?
Every strategy is informed by experience. It should be. The lessons of the past help leaders make better decisions, identify opportunities and avoid costly mistakes. But strategy isn't judged by how well it explains yesterday. It's judged by how well it performs tomorrow.
The challenge is that tomorrow is shaped by forces we cannot fully predict. Markets evolve, technologies mature, competitors respond and customer expectations shift. Rather than attempting to predict every possible future, exceptional leaders focus on the handful of critical uncertainties that could fundamentally alter the success of their strategy. They challenge assumptions, test strategic resilience and prepare their organisations to adapt, regardless of how the future unfolds.
Strategic Foresight for Leaders equips executives with the tools and frameworks to identify those critical uncertainties, construct multiple plausible scenarios, stress-test existing strategies and build robust strategic options that remain effective across a range of possible futures. The programme culminates in a board-ready Scenario Brief, integrating environmental scanning, scenario development, strategic implications, robust options and signposts into a practical decision-making tool.
What you'll experience
Strategic foresight is best developed through application, not theory.
Identify the critical uncertainties
You'll learn how to identify the critical uncertainties most likely to influence your strategy, develop multiple plausible future scenarios and test the resilience of your current thinking against each of them
Recognise strategic blind spots
Rather than searching for the "right" future, you'll build the capability to recognise strategic blind spots, challenge assumptions and identify robust strategic options that remain effective across a range of possible futures.
Explore diverse perspectives
Working alongside fellow executives, you'll explore diverse perspectives, challenge conventional thinking and strengthen your ability to make confident strategic decisions in uncertain environments.
Develop a board-ready Scenario Brief
By the end of the programme, you'll have developed a board-ready Scenario Brief tailored to your organisation, together with a practical strategic foresight process that you can apply to future business challenges long after the programme concludes.
Apply foresight to a live organisational challenge
This reflects the programme's emphasis on applying foresight to a live organisational challenge and producing a board-ready Scenario Brief rather than a theoretical exercise.
Who should attend?
Strategic Foresight for Leaders is designed for executives and senior decision-makers responsible for shaping strategy in an increasingly uncertain environment.
This programme is ideal for:
C-suite executives and business unit leaders
C-suite executives and business unit leaders responsible for long-term strategy and organisational performance.
Strategy, transformation and innovation leaders
Strategy, transformation and innovation leaders tasked with navigating change and identifying future opportunities.
General managers and functional executives
General managers and functional executives seeking to strengthen strategic decision-making in complex, fast-changing markets.
Senior leaders responsible for growth
Senior leaders responsible for growth, investment, market expansion or organisational transformation.
Programme at a glance
Duration
7 weeks
Hours per week
6-7 hours
Access
Online
Entry requirements
Each participant brings one live strategic question from their own organisation, or selects the programme's provided focal question if they are not currently working from an organisational mandate (for example, consultants, board members serving multiple organisations, or executives exploring the discipline ahead of an application).
Qualification
Red & Yellow Certificate of Completion
- Start date
- 01 Mar 2027
- Price
- R27 000
Course Curriculum
Explore why forecasting becomes unreliable under genuine uncertainty and when foresight and scenario planning provide a stronger basis for strategic decisions. You’ll identify the cognitive biases that can create strategic blind spots and frame a focused question around a future your organisation cannot simply predict.
Learn to identify and prioritise the forces most likely to reshape your strategic environment. Using structured environmental scanning, you’ll distinguish trends from weak signals and critical uncertainties, assess how different forces interact, and identify the uncertainties that should drive your scenarios.
Turn uncertainty into a set of plausible alternative futures. You’ll construct distinct, internally consistent scenarios around critical uncertainties, develop the narrative logic that makes each future credible, and examine where AI can support scenario development and where human strategic judgement must remain decisive.
Learn how to make rigorous scenario work change the way decision-makers think. You’ll use narrative craft and visual logic to make alternative futures tangible, and develop the skills to facilitate scenario conversations with executive and board-level audiences rather than simply presenting them with another report.
Stress-test your current strategy against multiple plausible futures to identify what holds, what breaks and what may be missing. You’ll identify robust options, hedges and no-regrets moves, and establish early-warning signposts that help your organisation recognise which future may be emerging.
Bring the complete scenario cycle together in a board-ready Scenario Brief built around your own strategic question. You’ll integrate your environmental scan, scenario set, strategic implications, robust options and signposts, then pressure-test your reasoning and prepare to lead a strategic conversation around what the organisation should do next.
What success looks like:
By the end of the programme, you'll be able to:
- Build strategies that remain resilient across multiple plausible futures, rather than relying on a single view of what lies ahead.
- Identify the critical uncertainties most likely to influence your organisation's future and assess their strategic implications.
- Challenge assumptions, recognise strategic blind spots and strengthen the quality of executive decision-making.
- Apply proven strategic foresight frameworks to evaluate emerging trends, risks and opportunities before they become competitive threats.
- Build strategies that don't depend on predicting the future to succeed.
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