Case Study: Getting Ready for the World in Five Years
摘要
Through the story of Yu Yan, a newly appointed chief political scientist at a Chinese tech giant, this chapter illustrates the challenge of operationalizing foresight in an environment addicted to short-term thinking. Faced with executives who make five-year decisions based on eighteen-month horizons, Yan realizes that foresight is not about producing reports but about building an organizational reflex. By institutionalizing uncomfortable practices like red-teaming (simulating adversary perspectives), Yan shifts the culture from seeking validation to stress-testing reality. The ultimate measure of success, the case ponders, is perhaps when the foresight team gets a prediction “right,” but when their work becomes invisible, that is, when the discipline of asking “what are we missing?” moves from a department to the very bloodstream of the organization.