Foresight Check · 12 questions · about 8 minutes
Foresight is measurable.
The Foresight Check determines how far your organisation sees ahead — and whether it turns what it sees into decisions. Twelve questions, six dimensions, one named finding.
No sign-up, no email address, no company name. The result appears immediately, in your browser.
What is measured
A chain, not a score
Foresight is a sequence: scanning, sensemaking, deciding, acting — carried by a practice that sets aside time and ownership for it. Each link can be strong on its own. The chain still holds only as well as its weakest point.
Foresight Practice
Does the future have a fixed place in the calendar — and someone who owns it?
Scanning
Where do the signals come from, and how far out is the horizon anyone talks about seriously?
Sensemaking
What happens to whatever does not fit the picture? And which images of the future are in use?
Decision Integration
Do those images bind decisions — and do they show up in the budget?
Action
Does a recognised development lead to a decision, an experiment, an option held open?
The sixth dimension: culture
Two questions sit outside the chain and still act on every one of its links: what happens when someone contradicts leadership with good reasons? And how does the organisation handle expectations that turned out to be wrong?
Anyone held liable for a wrong expectation will voice none in future. That dries out the entire chain from the back — which is why culture is reported separately and left out of the chain score.
Scoring: 0 to 4 per question · 0 to 8 per dimension · chain 0 to 40 · total 0 to 48. A dimension counts as future-capable from 5 out of 8.
The difference
Two organisations, same score, different illness
A score says how far along an organisation is. It does not say what is missing. Two companies with an identical result can be ill in entirely different ways: one simply has not started. The other actively turns things away.
Ten named disorders
Certain answers set a marker in addition to the score. It does not enter the arithmetic; it produces a second, named finding — and that finding is usually the actual reason someone goes looking for help.
Three pairs of markers carry a name of their own, because their effect is larger than the sum of the parts: Denial (there is no image of the future, and the signals that would force one are turned away), Knowledge without Access and Learning Block.
Active Dismissal Question 5
Signals that do not fit are not missed, they are turned away. That is not a gap in knowledge, it is a stance.
Faith in Continuity Question 6
The future counts as an extension of the present. The riskiest assumption of all, because it is never said out loud.
Power Budgeting Question 8
Resources follow influence, not argument. Foresight cannot win here, however good it is.
Powerlessness Question 9
You see it coming and can do nothing. The most expensive form: the knowledge is already paid for and never redeemed.
The result
Four directions — and one state below them
The front of the chain gives Sight, the back gives Effectiveness. Both axes together produce a type that does not grade, but describes where the organisation stands.
| Effectiveness low | Effectiveness high | |
|---|---|---|
| Sight high | The Observer Sees more than most, does the least with it. |
The Vigilant Sees early and acts. The rarest finding. |
| Sight low | The Surprised Neither sight nor effectiveness in place. The most common case. |
The Driven Acts decisively on a narrow view. |
The Aimless does not sit in the grid but below it: what is missing is not the right idea about the future but any idea at all. It overrides the result when the chain score is under 14 and at least two of the markers No Horizon, Faith in Continuity and Boardroom Impulse are set.
Openly available
The data set
Every completed assessment feeds anonymously into an open data set: distribution of maturity levels, average profile across the six dimensions, frequency of each of the ten disorders as a ranking, breakdown by sector and size class.
What is stored is scores, markers and the two optional details on sector and size — no company names, no free text, no IP addresses. Empirical values are only reported from 100 cases per cell; below that you see the case count, but no claim.
Twelve questions
Answer for your organisation, not for its intentions. The check is worthless if it describes what ought to be the case — and revealing if it describes what is.