25% of Fortune 500 Practices Foresight

Last fall we alerted the community that our student Lesia Fejer was kicking off a project to begin assessing the current state of foresight. The first round is done…results are in. The key takeaway is that 25% of the 2019 Fortune 500 companies are practicing foresight in some capacity today. We are assuming that the state of practice in the Fortune 500 gives us some clues about how widely foresight is being practiced in the private sector. Granted, it’s a US list, big companies, etc., but now we don’t have to guess. We have a starting number to build from.

Let’s chat about how we got that number…

First, we chose LinkedIn for our data pool. With over 60,000 people on LinkedIn associating their interests, education, careers or otherwise with “foresight” and over 14,000 for “Futurist” this was not going to be an easy task. We used two main search strategies to determine that percent.

1. Job Postings search. We looked for roles that called for a “futurist” or had the word “future”, “forecast”, “foresight” and even looked at some “emerging technology” job listings. We looked through the job description on each of these and only added it to our list if the job’s responsibilities were that of a futurist, that is, the person was trained in foresight on the job or in the classroom.
2. People search. We looked up people from each Fortune 500 company who had a tag in their profile of “Foresight”, “APF Member”, “Forecast”, Scenario Planning”, “Trend Analysis”, “Future”, “Futurist”, “Future Of”, “Emerging Technology” and “Horizon Scanning.” We had to read these profiles in total and added them to the list if somewhere in their profile they describe typical foresight capabilities as part of their work.

And finally, the list of 123 of the Fortune 500 companies practicing foresight through in-house efforts:

We have big ambitions for how we can expand our research to be able to get a more complete view of the state of foresight. Some of our next steps include:

• Reach out to select people at the Fortune 500 companies to get confirmation on the level of foresight in the organization
• Identify consultancies and outsourced foresight landscape in the US
• Get a view of foresight work by industry and private vs. public
• Use a maturity scale to better evaluate in the future (likely the Foresight Maturity Model FMM)

And further down the road we hope to find:

• How was it introduced?
• What are the tools being practices? E.g. scanning, scenarios, CLA
• Success stories
• Track key literatures

It is our hope that in a few years, we will be ENCOURAGING the Fortune 500 community to proudly tout their foresight practices.

So stay tuned community…foresight is becoming mainstream!