Foresight in the Age of Radical Uncertainty

I was at a recent Globe and Mail Event held in Toronto where Canada’s political, business, and policy leaders gathered for frank, at times uncomfortable, conversations about the country’s future. The themes were wide-ranging: trade, sovereignty, capital, innovation, and identity. But beneath the surface, a single question unified them all: What does it take to build foundations strong enough to embrace an uncertain future rather than be paralysed by it? That is a foresight question.

Structural uncertainty in Canada is now the baseline, not a temporary condition. Leaders who keep waiting for stability will keep waiting. Some of the factors contributing to this instability include fraught CUSMA negotiations, a decrease in Canadian-founded high-potential startups staying in Canada (down from two-thirds a decade ago), and a disparagingly high youth unemployment rate. In addition to business concerns, national fragmentation from the Alberta separatism movement to the continued marginalization of Indigenous worldviews, compounds every other risk on the list.

These are serious challenges. But the more important story lies in what connected them, forming a map for navigating what comes next.

Leaders across industries are confronting the same reality: traditional strategic planning, which is built on predictable environments and stable assumptions, no longer serves. The shift underway is from forecasting to foresight, from control to orchestration, from efficiency to agility. This is not a marginal adjustment, but a fundamental reorientation of how organizations and institutions must now operate. The leaders in that room were not debating whether the old model was broken. They were asking what would replace it.

So, how can leaders plan in this turbulence? In the absence of certainty, values are the only reliable navigational tool. They do not tell you what will happen, but they tell you what matters enough to act on regardless. Foresight without values loses its anchor and becomes mere technocracy: sophisticated sensing without moral direction. What distinguished the most compelling voices in the room was not the sophistication of their analysis. It was the clarity of what they stood for. The leaders who will navigate this era are those who have done the inner work of knowing their values, not just their plans.

What I took from the room.

Sitting in that space, I was struck by something both simple and significant: many of the most important conversations at the event were fundamentally about foresight: reading signals, building resilience, and acting with values under pressure. Leaders were doing foresight without calling it foresight. That is both an observation and an opportunity.

Canada has eroded the advisory systems that give negotiators strategic intelligence. We have under-invested in the anticipatory capacities that turn disruption into momentum. We are graduating students into a world that demands futures thinking, using curricula built for a world that no longer exists. These are not small gaps.

And yet I left Toronto with genuine optimism whereby people grapple honestly with hard questions and choose action over paralysis. Canada’s leaders are, collectively, arriving at the right questions, but the work now is to build the institutional architecture, the educational models, and the leadership cultures that translate those questions into action.

If we choose to act now, this period need not be remembered as the moment uncertainty overwhelmed us. It can be remembered as the moment we built the anticipatory capacity to turn uncertainty into resilience.

That is the work of foresight.

References

Lammam, C. (2026, February 27). The troubling data behind Canada’s entrepreneurship decline: DeepDive. The Hub. https://thehub.ca/2026/02/27/the-troubling-data-behind-canadas-entrepreneurship-decline-deepdive/

Cross, P. (2026, April 30). The extraordinary increase of youth unemployment in Canada. Fraser Institute. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/extraordinary-increase-youth-unemployment-canada