Dominik Balthasar, PhD 13 August 2026
Every year, Harvard Business School publishes 350 new case studies. Every year, consulting firms deploy thousands of decision tree analyses. And, every year, business schools train tens of thousands of students to systematically eliminate options for the one preferred solution to emerge. The method is elegant, influential, and – for specific problems – remarkably effective.
Under conditions of risk, in which stability prevails, decision-making by analogy and elimination proofs powerful. Yet, in contexts of uncertainty, for which historical precedents do not exist per definition, the logic of decision trees and elimination strategies breaks down. In the face of volatile markets, democratic erosion, technological disruption, and environmental breakdown, answers lie beyond the confines of prevailing knowledge.
That is where strategic foresight comes in: by scrutinizing deep-seated assumptions and expanding our capacity to imagine possibilities that are offered by emerging futures only, foresight methods stimulate strategic conversations beyond known boundaries. In expanding strategic options, the process provides tangible opportunity to better navigate the changes we experience, and those we seek to shape.
The Promise and the Trap
Having emerged in the 1960s, with Harvard Business Review championing them as tools giving management “greater ease and clarity”, decision trees have come to be embedded across business consulting firms. The appeal is real, with research suggesting that executive spend 40% of their time on decision-making, seeking neat categories as optimal framework (De Smet et al. 2023). Consequently, Harvard Business School, amongst others, train students through roughly 500 ‘decision-forcing exercises’. The influence is undeniable.
When applying decision trees, consultants and business leaders do, however, not merely ‘trim branches’ – eliminating options deemed ‘not worth pursuing’. By confining their thinking to a predefined body of knowledge and assumptions, they also ‘trim solutions’ – excluding any strategic options falling outside a preexisting, historically bounded set.
Wallace Donham, who established Harvard’s case method, recognized this limitation even as he pioneered it. He expressed doubt that the method could adequately address ‘larger societal ills’ and ‘systemic economic challenges’ (MacLellan 2022). Additionally, both decision trees and case studies derive legitimacy from precedent, which creates a ‘flawed logic of translatability’ – assuming lessons from historical contexts apply to today’s situations. At times, this might work. Yet, if context have fundamentally shifted, analogical reasoning becomes deeply flawed.
The Consequences: When Elimination Meets Unprecedented Change
The limitations become acute when we need imagination most. Before COVID-19, many nations had case studies identifying pandemics as plausible threats. The analysis was sound. Yet most remained unprepared. Nordic countries with stronger institutional foresight demonstrated markedly better pandemic response. The difference was not analytical sophistication but imaginative capacity: the ability to explore how novel pathogens might interact with modern infrastructure in ways no historical case captured.
If case material becomes outdated in five-to-ten years, the problem intensifies as change accelerates. More fundamentally, still, decision trees rely on historical frequencies to assign probabilities. Unprecedented changes – AI-driven disruption, climate tipping points, novel pandemics, autonomous governance models – lack the historical data needed for reliable probability assignment. One cannot calculate expected value for futures, particularly not for ones never imagined.
Strategic Foresight: Going Beyond Known Knowns
Strategic foresight operates from a different premise. Instead of following a converging process of decision-making that identifies the best amongst known options, foresight embarks on a process of divergence by expanding the mental models executives work with.
This distinction matters profoundly. Foresight acknowledges the future is plural, not singular. Rather than calculating a single, presumably most probable path, it builds multiple plausible scenarios – elements of which the future that ultimately materializes will actually wash ashore in some form or variation. By scrutinizing fundamental assumptions undergirding case studies and decision trees, and by monitoring and imagining changes occurring within an actor’s contextual environment, strategic foresight fosters strategic conversations rooting deeper than case studies and decision trees ever can.
In recognizing its strategic value, some 25% of all Fortune 500 companies (Hines 2019) as well as a range of governments have come to embed foresight into their decision-making processes. One case in point is Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, established in the Prime Minister’s Office, which develops contingency plans for “black swan” events. Meanwhile, Canada’s Policy Horizons and the OECD’s Strategic Foresight Unit make anticipatory governance central to decision-making.
The World Economic Forum’s Strategic Role
The World Economic Forum’s Global Strategic Foresight Community is uniquely positioned to accelerate this shift. Three actions can drive transition:
First, institutionalize a global repository of foresight methodologies, making horizon scanning and scenario exploration as accessible as decision trees. When foresight becomes expected leadership competency, cultural shift accelerates.
Second, establish cross-sector foresight laboratories where business, government, and civil society explore scenarios transcending traditional boundaries. How might economic models balance growth with planetary boundaries? What governance innovations strengthen democratic resilience? These questions require structured conversation among diverse perspectives – precisely what the Forum seeks to achieve.
Third, champion foresight as standard not only in risk governance but also opportunity management and corporate strategy. The Forum could develop benchmarking tools and competency frameworks helping organizations measure anticipatory capacity. Meanwhile, it might encourage business schools to teach both: case analysis and foresight methodology, as organizations need not only analytical rigor for known domains, but also imaginative capacity for unknown futures.
The Irony That Changes Everything
Here is what often goes unnoticed: consequential strategic failures did not occur because executives lacked analytical rigor. They occurred because imagination was constrained to refinement of existing models. Executives were trained by systems teaching mastery within existing paradigms while providing few tools for questioning paradigms themselves.
This is where strategic foresight becomes necessity, not luxury. In conditions of accelerating change, competitive advantage flows to organizations with greatest imaginative capacity. The irony is sharp: we optimized educational systems for stability just as stability has seemingly become antiquated.
The path forward requires admitting this systemic limitation and building complementary capacity. Organizations mastering both elimination and imagination will outthink those confined to either alone.
Outlook: The Inevitable Shift
This shift from optimizing decision trees to transformational foresight is arriving not as intellectual preference but organizational imperative.
The World Economic Forum’s Strategic Foresight Community has platform, network, and mandate to accelerate this transition. By making foresight tools as accessible as decision trees, by demonstrating that imagination can be structured and rigorous, by changing expectations of what strategic thinking requires, the Forum can help organizations graduate from optimization within known paradigms to navigation across multiple possible futures.
The goal is not a world without decision trees. It is a world where imagination and elimination work in tandem – where leaders optimize existing business while preparing for futures they have hardly even imagined. This is the promise of strategic foresight – a promise worth taking.
References
De Smet, Aaron, Eileen Rinaudo, Frithjof Lund, and Leigh Weiss (2023): What is Decision-Making? McKinsey: Boston. URL: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-decision-making
Hines, Andy (2020). “When Did It Start? Origin of the Foresight Field.” World Futures Review, 12 (1): 4-11.
MacLellan, Lila (2022): The problem with Harvard Business School case studies. Quartz. URL: https://qz.com/work/1385066/the-problem-with-harvard-business-school-case-studies