Practice 01 · Strategic foresight
PULSE.
For organisations that refuse to be surprised. Not a forecast — a method for making committed choices that hold across several futures, and for knowing early when one of them stops being the one you are in.
Five phases · 4 to 16 weeks · capability transferred
01The problem
Planning usually assumes tomorrow looks roughly like today.
So organisations build strategy around a single forecast, optimise for efficiency in a world that rewards adaptability, and treat uncertainty as something to be managed rather than a capability to be built.
The failure mode is consistent: plans go obsolete before they are implemented, and not because the analysis was wrong. Because the world changed in a direction the plan never considered — and nobody had agreed in advance what would count as evidence that it had.
The useful question is not “what will happen?” It is “what could challenge our strategy, and would we notice in time?”
PULSE is built for the second question. It does not try to predict. It prepares a leadership team for several futures and builds a position that creates value across them. The output is not a menu of options — it is a set of committed bets with named owners, and a written record of what was rejected and why.
02The framework
Five phases, and each one ends in something you keep.
Cumulative rather than sequential-for-its-own-sake: each phase is only possible because the previous one produced a specific artefact. A phase that produces a conversation and no artefact has not finished.
Prepare the foundation
What do we believe — and what happens if we are wrong?
Understand the environment
What forces are shaping our future — and how do they interact?
Look ahead at plausible futures
What worlds could we find ourselves operating in — and how would each change the game?
Select the adaptive path
What do we commit to — and what flexibility do we deliberately keep?
Execute with agility
How do we implement decisively while staying ready to change our minds?
03Fit
It does not replace your planning cycle.
PULSE sits above the planning architecture you already run and makes the rest of it more robust. Everything below inherits its scenarios and its commitments.
▲ PULSE · Strategic foresight
Long-range forecasting
Mid-range planning
Brand planning
▼ Tactical planning
The value of the cascade is not tidiness. It is that a tactical decision taken in month four can be traced to a strategic assumption — so when that assumption breaks, you know what else has to change.
It fits an organisation at a strategic inflection — a portfolio transition, a market shift, a major planning cycle, or the plain recognition that the next decade will not resemble the last, with a leadership team willing to spend real hours in a room disagreeing on the record. It does not fit a team that wants reassurance, or a plan to show a board without changing anything, or one that will send delegates to the war-gaming. If that is the situation, we say so on the first call rather than three months in.
04Delivery
Three shapes.
Full engagement
Accelerated sprint
Refresh
Capability transfer is in every one of them. Method documentation, step-by-step guides, and structured handover — because the objective is that you run the refresh yourselves, not that you book it.
A first engagement can also start at Ignition — one question from the framework, taken seriously, in days to weeks. The four depths →
05Proof
We are not going to tell you it has worked elsewhere.
Not because it hasn’t. Because our clients have not agreed to be named, and a track record described by the firm that produced it — unnamed clients, unverifiable figures, unattributed outcomes — is worth precisely nothing to a buyer who is doing their job.
So we show you the output instead. The Strategic Decision Record that Phase S produces — every section, the evidence grading, the recorded dissent, what we declined to do — is what we walk through in the first conversation.
Read it and judge the method. That is a harder test than a case study and a more useful one.
06Start
Bring the question, not the brief.
The first conversation is about one decision you are facing, who has to sign it, and when it is needed. If PULSE is the wrong instrument we will tell you which of the six practices is the right one — or that none of them is.