Four Keys to Effective Horizon Scanning

Wave after wave of disruption promises continual changes to the global economy. Historians will be able to look back and draw lines between before and after disruptive events, but living in the middle is messy. One critical skill in the face of this uncertainty is horizon scanning. The Institute for the Future’s Bob Johansen — who has been a futurist since 1973 — describes the process of horizon scanning as turning foresight about future possibilities into insight about future realities, and insight into action. In a class on the subject at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, I teach four essential behaviors of good horizon scanners.

1. Curiosity

First, good horizon scanners are curious. They live the line spoken by science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” To bring this concept to life, I have students write a “report from the future,” where they personally try an emerging technology that’s new to them and reflect on the experience. Examples include using AI to write a song or code, using 23andMe to trace their ancestry, participating in e-sports, or buying a nonfungible token.

An inevitable finding from the experience is that there is a huge difference between reading about a technology and experiencing it firsthand. One student, for example, was blown away by how developed e-sports is and noted how Amazon turned an early insight into action when it bought streaming platform Twitch for $970 million in 2014.

One of my own examples is taking a robotaxi during a recent trip to San Francisco. I found the experience decidedly mixed. It was cool, for sure, but there were several times where what would be simple for a human proved to be complex for the algorithm powering my car. For example, at one point, we got stuck at a right turn because a pedestrian had stepped off the curb into the road while waiting for the walk signal, and the car’s algorithm told it to stop and wait for the person to cross. The technology will surely improve, but it will require significant systemwide change for robotaxis to reach mass adoption.

Regulations and norms around robotaxis are still being formulated. There will be significant system-level changes before there is mass adoption. System-level change takes time and is unpredictable. On the other hand, you can plan for demographic change. There will be more people in Africa in 30 years than there are now. If you are a high-volume consumer goods company, you can confidently invest ahead of that change. The lesson: Bet on demographics, but hedge on systems.

2. A Scientific Approach

Second, good horizon scanners are scientific. The 2015 book Superforecasting, by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, recounts the results of the Good Judgment Project, an effort sponsored by U.S. intelligence agencies to learn about forecasting seemingly unforecastable events like wars, revolutions, and pandemics. It turns out that there are those who do a meaningfully better job predicting what would seem to be unpredictable. The trick is to break problems into components, distinguish knowns from unknowns, and draw on multiple data sources.

To reinforce this kind of scientific approach in my class, I pick a few open challenges from the Good Judgment Project and ask my students to choose one with which they disagree and to provide their rationale. For example, in early November 2024, 48% of my students predicted that Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams wouldn’t throw between 15 and 21 touchdowns during the 2024 NFL regular season. One student used statistical analysis to suggest that the number would be lower. Another analyzed the team’s schedule and the strength of its offensive line to predict that the number would be higher. By the time the Bears’s season ended in early January, Williams had thrown 20 touchdowns. The students who had bet against the consensus view of the prediction market and were wrong had the opportunity to learn from it and improve their forecasting skills.

3. Humility

Third, good horizon scanners are humble. It’s well known that the worst predictions of the future often come from people with expertise. In July 2007, no less than Clayton Christensen, the father of disruptive innovation, predicted that the iPhone would fail. “They’ve launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat,” he said. “It’s not truly disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.”

Humility means recognizing the myriad biases and blind spots that stand in the way of identifying disruptive developments early. As George Day and Paul Schoemaker noted in an influential academic article on the importance of spotting and interpreting weak signals, “The cognitive challenges at the periphery are far greater than in our focal areas since there are less data to work with and more room for bias and distortion to trip us up.”

One key to overcoming those challenges is to regularly update forecasts as new information comes in. That’s what superforecasters do. “Superforecasting demands thinking that is open-minded, careful, curious, and — above all — self-critical,” Tetlock and Gardner wrote in Superforecasting. “Our analyses have consistently found commitment to self-improvement to be the strongest predictor of performance.”

4. Storytelling Ability

Finally, good horizon scanners are compelling storytellers. It’s one thing for an individual to have insight about the future. It’s another to compel a group to act when facing a high degree of uncertainty. There’s perhaps no better example of this than President John F. Kennedy’s speech before a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate on May 25, 1961.

After spending 37 minutes pushing for increased spending on foreign aid and defense, Kennedy spent his final eight minutes talking about space exploration. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” he said. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

Kennedy’s vision was compelling. You can picture it. You can feel it. “Our brains are wired for stories,” Johansen once said. “And if they don’t hear stories, they make them up.” Creatively communicating future possibilities is a powerful way to motivate a group to act through uncertainty.

In times of uncertainty, it feels tempting to throw your hands up and declare it impossible to see what’s coming next. It might indeed be impossible to get it precisely right. Don’t curse the darkness. Light a candle. Horizon scanning — the effort to turn foresight into insight, and insight into action — will help you when the next unexpected thing happens.

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