The Architects of Tomorrow … How leaders can embrace a future mindset, foresight with flexibility … inspired by Disney’s Imagineering and Lego’s future labs … to deliver a better business today and tomorrow

November 1, 2025

The boardroom on the top floor of a glass-fronted tower in Milan’s Porta Nuova district was silent. Outside, the Lombardy sun glinted off the spires of the Duomo. Inside, the atmosphere was deliberate, almost surgical.

The CEO of a global consumer goods company was not studying the quarterly P&L. He was staring at a digital signals map projected across an entire wall — a living mosaic of emerging behaviours, regulatory shifts and technological inflections. The falling cost of lab-grown collagen in Singapore. The rise of sober-curious social clubs in Berlin. A proposed EU directive on the “Right to Repair”.

“The 2026 budget is irrelevant,” he said eventually, turning to his executive team. “If we are still planning for a world where people buy things to own them, rather than access them, we are managing a museum — not a business. Our competitors are no longer just other FMCG firms. They are the companies that see the world from the outside-in.”

That moment marked the creation of the company’s new Impact Function — a mandate to connect foresight directly to strategy, capital allocation and everyday decisions. It also reflected a much broader shift now taking place in boardrooms from Milan to London to New York.

The definition of leadership is changing.

To lead today is no longer to be the custodian of past success. It is to become an architect of the future.

Why the future has arrived early

For decades, leadership was largely about managing what you could see. Markets moved slowly. Industries were stable. Strategy was a plan; execution was the challenge. The future could safely be left to forecasts, five-year cycles and specialist teams.

That era is over.

Today, the future arrives early — and unevenly. It breaks into the present through technology, regulation, climate, geopolitics and culture. It reshapes supply chains before it reshapes markets. It changes consumer expectations before organisations are ready to respond.

We are living in an age of outside-in volatility.

The most powerful forces acting on businesses no longer originate inside industries or value chains. They emerge from the margins — from social movements, youth culture, environmental limits, regulatory intervention and exponential technologies — and cascade rapidly into the core.

In this environment, long-term thinking is no longer a luxury. It is a prerequisite for relevance.

From performance to preparedness

Many organisations remain well run — operationally disciplined, financially strong, executionally capable. Yet they struggle not because they are inefficient, but because they are increasingly misaligned with the future.

Performance without relevance is temporary.

A future mindset reframes the central leadership question. Not:

How do we optimise what we do today?

But:

What will matter — and still matter — in five, ten or fifteen years?

This is not about prediction. It is about preparedness.

Every major strategic decision is a bet on the future — whether leaders acknowledge it or not. The difference between resilient organisations and vulnerable ones is whether those bets are conscious, tested and diversified.

Thinking like a futurist: discipline, not dreaming

Foresight is often misunderstood as speculation or trend-watching. In reality, it is a discipline — a structured way of observing how the world is changing and what those changes imply for strategy, capability and investment.

At its core, a future mindset involves three capabilities:

  • The ability to detect weak signals early

  • The discipline to interpret them systemically

  • The courage to act before certainty arrives

This is not about forecasting a single future. It is about preparing for multiple plausible ones.

The most future-ready leaders do not ask, “What will happen?”
They ask, “What would we do if this happened?”

From foresight to decision-making: what best practice looks like

To identify the gold standard in corporate foresight, it is not enough to look at companies with innovation labs or trend reports. The true leaders are those who have embedded foresight into governance, capital allocation and everyday operations.

Disney: backcasting the future of experience

Disney’s evolution from a traditional animation studio into a multi-platform entertainment ecosystem is the result of deliberate future thinking.

Rather than extrapolating from the present, Disney frequently uses backcasting — defining a desired future state and working backwards to determine what capabilities, technologies and acquisitions are required to get there.

When Disney asks, “What will immersive storytelling look like in 2040?”, the answer shapes decisions made today — from acquisitions such as Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm to investments in theme parks, streaming platforms and experiential technologies.

Disney also maintains a dedicated strategic foresight capability that works directly with the C-suite, identifying disruptive “black swan” events — from pandemics to shifts in travel behaviour — and exploring their implications long before they materialise.

The result is not agility alone, but coherence across decades.

Shell: making uncertainty governable

Shell is widely regarded as the pioneer of corporate foresight. Its scenarios team has been operating for more than half a century, famously helping the company navigate the oil shocks of the 1970s by having already rehearsed a world of volatile prices and geopolitical disruption.

What distinguishes Shell is not the quality of its scenarios, but how they are used. Shell does not attempt to predict a single future. Instead, it develops multiple, radically different “possible worlds” — and stress-tests strategy and investments against each of them.

Foresight at Shell is not advisory. It is institutionalised. No major capital project proceeds without a scenario resilience check. In effect, foresight functions as a governance mechanism, forcing leaders to confront uncomfortable possibilities before committing billions.

Uncertainty is not eliminated — it is made manageable.

Unilever: using the future as a strategic constraint

Unilever stands out for its deeply outside-in approach, particularly around social and environmental megatrends.

Through its Sustainable Living Plan — now evolved into the Unilever Compass — the company integrated foresight into its brand and portfolio strategy. Instead of asking what competitors are doing, Unilever asks what the world will require.

What does it mean to operate within planetary boundaries?
What will consumers expect of brands in a carbon-constrained, resource-limited world?

These questions become strategic constraints that shape innovation, sourcing, packaging and marketing decisions today.

Unilever uses “future-fit” benchmarks — measuring brands not just against current market norms, but against what will be necessary by 2030 and beyond. This forces earlier, sometimes uncomfortable, pivots — but builds long-term relevance and trust.

Siemens: turning foresight into investment logic

As an industrial technology leader, Siemens has institutionalised foresight through its “Pictures of the Future” methodology.

This approach combines systematic trend scouting with “wild card” analysis — low-probability, high-impact events that could fundamentally reshape markets. The output is not generic trend decks, but detailed future scenarios for specific domains such as energy systems, mobility and urban infrastructure.

Crucially, these future pictures inform R&D roadmaps and portfolio decisions. When foresight suggests that decentralised energy will dominate, Siemens begins reallocating investment away from centralised fossil-based systems years before markets peak.

Foresight becomes an early-warning system — and a trigger for capital reallocation.

Lego: designing for future relevance

LEGO’s turnaround from near-bankruptcy in the early 2000s was built on a profound commitment to foresight and human insight.

The company established a Future Lab that operates with startup-like autonomy, supported by a global scanning network of children, educators, technologists and cultural observers. The goal is not to track toy trends, but to understand how play itself is evolving — cognitively, socially and digitally.

This foresight reshaped LEGO’s strategy: expanding into digital gaming, movies and experiences, while simultaneously investing in sustainable materials and circular design.

LEGO did not abandon its core. It reinterpreted it for the future.

Foresight in action

Across these organisations, a clear pattern emerges. Foresight works when it meets four conditions:

It sits close to power
Foresight reports to the CEO or Chief Strategy Officer — not buried in marketing or innovation.

It balances time horizons
Leaders manage today’s performance, tomorrow’s growth and the day-after-tomorrow’s disruption simultaneously.

It welcomes diverse thinking
Anthropologists, scientists, designers and even science-fiction writers sit alongside economists and strategists.

It shapes decisions, not just dialogue
Foresight informs capital allocation, portfolio choices and risk appetite — not just workshops.

What leaders must do differently

A future mindset is not a function or a framework. It is a leadership stance.

It requires leaders to move:

  • From certainty to curiosity
  • From defending legacy to designing possibility
  • From control to orchestration
  • From short-term optimisation to long-term relevance

Making better decisions today

Crucially, a future mindset improves the quality of decisions made now.

Leaders use foresight to allocate capital more intelligently — shifting investment away from defending declining models and towards building future capabilities. Portfolios are actively rebalanced, with clear distinctions between businesses that generate cash today and those that create relevance tomorrow.

Risk is reframed. Instead of being treated solely as something to minimise, emerging risks — regulatory, technological, environmental — are surfaced early, when mitigation is cheaper and strategic options still exist. Foresight enables leaders to avoid costly late-stage pivots by acting before pressure becomes acute.

At the same time, opportunity is pulled forward. Future-ready organisations enter new spaces earlier, shape standards, build ecosystems and secure talent before competitors recognise the shift. This is how advantage compounds — not through speed alone, but through timing.

The result is not reckless ambition, but informed boldness.

What it means in practice

Across the world’s most future-ready organisations, the same patterns appear:

  • Foresight reports to the CEO or Chief Strategy Officer

  • Leadership balances today, next and beyond

  • Diverse thinkers complement traditional strategists

  • Insight is directly linked to investment and governance

Foresight works when it shapes decisions, not when it decorates presentations.

Perhaps most importantly, it requires leaders to create psychological safety — allowing uncomfortable signals to surface, inconvenient questions to be asked, and sacred assumptions to be challenged.

The future rarely fails loudly. It whispers first.

The future is built now

The future is not a distant destination. It is something organisations build — decision by decision, investment by investment, assumption by assumption.

Back in that Milan boardroom, the CEO did not simply admire the signals map. He acted on it. 20% of R&D investment was reallocated from line extensions to future-facing innovation.

The organisations that will define the next decade are already being shaped today — by leaders willing to think beyond certainty, act before proof, and design for a world that does not yet fully exist.

Leadership, now, is no longer about managing what is.

It is about architecting what comes next.

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