Future foresight needs strangesight, not certainty

The world no longer moves from one tidy crisis to the next. Economic pressure, climate instability, geopolitical fracture, war, social distrust, and rapid technological change are all arriving at once, layering over each other. Volatility is no longer an interruption to normal life. It is part of the atmosphere.

That is exactly why foresight matters. But it is also why foresight is so often misunderstood.

Too often, foresight is treated as a prediction tool. Something that helps leaders reduce uncertainty and arrive at one clear answer about what comes next. A cleaner line through the noise. A little more control over what feels unstable.

But good foresight was never really about certainty.

It is about seeing the present with more depth. It helps us question assumptions, notice weak signals, explore consequences, and recognise patterns before they become too embedded to challenge. At its best, foresight does not hand us a finished story about the future. It gives us a better way of reading the world we are already in.

And that matters, because many of the frames people still rely on were built for a more stable environment. They assume continuity. They assume institutions will broadly hold, that norms will shift slowly, that the background conditions of work and life remain more or less intact. But when the ground is moving, familiar frameworks can keep producing confident answers long after they have stopped being enough.

This is where strangesight becomes useful.

Strangesight is the practice of making the familiar feel strange again. It is a way of looking twice at what has become normal. It helps us notice what we have stopped seeing precisely because it now seems ordinary.

In unstable times, that is often where the most important signals live.

Not always in the dramatic event.
Not always in the headline.
But in the quieter shifts that alter behaviour before language catches up.

A new habit at the edges.
A subtle loss of trust.
A growing weariness with speed.
A system becoming invisible because it has folded itself into daily life.
A decision that no longer feels fully ours, because it has already been shaped upstream by a platform, a feed, or a machine.

Take AI as the clearest example. The question is no longer whether AI is arriving. It is already here, shaping how people search, write, learn, recruit, decide, create, and pay attention. The more interesting question is what kinds of habits, dependencies, and ways of seeing it is producing as it becomes ordinary.

This is where cognitive sovereignty becomes useful too.

In simple terms, cognitive sovereignty means staying in authorship of your own mind. It means keeping some freedom over your attention, judgment, memory, and imagination in systems that increasingly anticipate, guide, and shape what you see. Not rejecting technology, but not drifting passively into whatever it optimises for either.

That matters for foresight because the real risk is not only that we fail to predict the future accurately. It is that we become too numbed to notice what the present is doing to us while it is still happening.

And AI is only one part of the picture. Across many contexts, we are also seeing compressed time horizons, rising emotional fatigue, a stronger demand for certainty, and a growing hunger for trust, steadiness, and psychological grounding. The future is not only appearing in labs, policy documents, or headlines. It is appearing in households, workplaces, habits, and in the emotional weather of everyday life.

That means foresight needs more than forecasting logic. It needs cultural sensitivity, emotional literacy, and the capacity to hold multiple realities at once.

Because there is never just one future waiting ahead of us. There are many possible futures, shaped by different values, infrastructures, power dynamics, and lived experiences of the present. If foresight only reflects dominant assumptions, it does not really expand thought. It simply makes the current worldview sound more sophisticated.

Strangesight interrupts that.

It asks us to look again at what feels obvious.
To question the frame, not just the signal.
To stay with ambiguity a little longer than is comfortable.
To ask not only what is changing, but what deeper tension that change reveals.

For organisations, this matters more than ever. When leaders say, “We didn’t see this coming,” the problem is often not that there were no signals. The signals were there. They simply did not fit the frame being used to interpret them. The categories were too blunt. The assumptions underneath them were too old. The world was being read through a language that no longer matched the conditions.

So the role of foresight now is not to eliminate uncertainty.

It is to build a better relationship with it.

To notice earlier.
To imagine wider.
To test assumptions before they harden into strategy.
To recognise where our own habits of perception have been dulled by speed, familiarity, or inherited ways of thinking.

That is the value of strangesight.

Sometimes what organisations need most is not a clearer view of the future, but a less numbed view of the present.

Tim Lucas
Head of Hyper Island North America
PhD in Anthropology

Want to go deeper? Watch the webinar recording on Future Foresight & Critical Thinking with AI with Tim Lucas and Sabryna Alsfasser. In the session, they explore how foresight and critical thinking can help leaders make better decisions in complexity, and how AI can be used to widen perspective without replacing human judgment.