Building Future Cultures: Why Foresight Must Become an Everyday Practice
# AI
# Interview
# Key Trends
# Thought Leadership
An interview with futurists Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith of Changeist
In this Siemens Xcelerator Community Thought Leadership conversation, futurists Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith of Changeist share insights from their decades of work helping governments, global brands, and NGOs navigate uncertainty. Drawing from their book Future Cultures, they discuss why foresight must move beyond one-off exercises to become part of organizational culture.
Note: You will find a video of the interview at the end of this post.
Foresight Is Everyone's Job
When organizations think about the future, too many still treat it as an occasional exercise, an offsite every few years, or a scenario planning workshop when uncertainty feels overwhelming. Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith of Changeist argue that this approach is dangerously shortsighted.
“It's like driving at night with the headlights off and only occasionally voting to switch them on for five minutes,” Scott explains. “You don’t really get a feel for the road that way”.
Instead, Changeist advocate embedding foresight into organizational culture, making it something everyone practices, not just a specialized team. Their latest book, Future Cultures, highlights how organizations can move beyond one-off exercises to create a shared, ongoing capacity for anticipating change.
The Perils of “Solution in Search of a Problem”
Many tech companies fall into a trap: believing they make the future, rather than having to adapt to it. Susan recalls working with a Silicon Valley company convinced they didn’t need better foresight methods. “They said, we’re making the future. Yet they were repeatedly blindsided by political, regulatory, and social shifts”.
That mindset, Scott adds, creates moonshot projects without context, brilliant engineering aimed at no clear target. The result is wasted resources and fragile strategies.
From Hyperchange to Nervous Systems
One of the big questions leaders face is whether the world is truly changing faster than ever. Scott challenges that assumption. “It’s not just speed,” he says. “It’s connectedness. Change now moves like a nervous system, instantaneously, across borders and industries”.
The rise of generative AI illustrates this. “When ChatGPT launched, adoption curves shattered past benchmarks like fax machines or the early internet. And the next tool down the pipeline, like DeepSeek, spreads just as fast because the system is already primed”.
For executives, this means competitive advantage depends less on forecasting a single trend and more on building resilience to a web of rapidly propagating changes.
Embedding Foresight: The “Four Rs”
So how can leaders move from one-off foresight exercises to building a living future culture? The Smiths offer a framework:
Ritual: Create recurring practices, like weekly “signal sharing” sessions where teams discuss weak signals they’ve observed.
Recognition: Make foresight visible and valued, with leadership support and communication.
Results: Document and share successes where foresight led to better outcomes.
Reinforcement: Keep the practice alive with regular updates, events, and leadership emphasis.
This rhythm transforms foresight from “a great workshop that led nowhere” into a cultural muscle.
Communities as Engines of Foresight
For Siemens and the Xcelerator Community, this has direct relevance. Susan stresses that innovation communities can play a vital role in foresight if they experiment. “Use the existing forums, try small ways of engaging people, make it easy for them to feel they’re doing well, and give them tools that show there are no wrong answers”.
Scott adds that successful communities tap into how organizations already talk to themselves. “Every company has its folklore, whether product-driven, customer-driven, or genius-driven. You don’t need a holodeck. You need to use the language and practices that already feel natural”.
Signals of the Future: Sustainability and Beyond
On sustainability, Scott points to hopeful developments in climate finance and digital modeling. “Markets are digging in. When money is at stake, not just rhetoric, things move. We’re seeing powerful innovations in finance and digital twins reshaping climate strategy in ways that don’t make headlines yet”.
Susan warns against illusions of costless digital transformation. “Data centers consume massive amounts of water. Rare earth mining is reshaping ecosystems. Training large AI models can use as much energy as a small city. We need to weigh those costs alongside innovation”.
A Strategic Question for the Decade Ahead
Perhaps the most urgent question the Smiths leave us with is this: how will companies navigate a world where technology is no longer seamlessly global? “We had decades of globalization. Now we see deglobalization of infrastructure, standards, and AI ecosystems. Leaders will increasingly have to ask: whose AI, whose cloud, whose data?” Scott says.
For industrial leaders, the strategic implications are profound. Choices about partners and ecosystems may lock organizations into spheres of influence for years to come.
Takeaway for the Xcelerator Community
Foresight is a culture. By embedding foresight into everyday practices, Siemens and its community of innovators can build resilience against hyperconnected change. Communities like Xcelerator can amplify this by experimenting with ways to surface signals, share perspectives, and co-create scenarios.
As Susan puts it: “Meet people where they are. Give them simple, accessible ways to imagine the future together. And remember, there are no wrong answers”.
Watch the Full Interview
Find Out More About Changeist
Founded in 2007, Changeist is a multidisciplinary lab and consulting group that helps organizations around the world identify, make sense of, structure and tell stories about what’s next.
https://changeist.com/
