BY DR SHAWN CUNNINGHAM
28 AUGUST 2025

Do you sometimes feel like you’re constantly on the back foot as surprise after surprise disrupts your plans? Are you continually having to shuffle your priorities, meaning that your long-term strategies are put on hold as you face more immediate challenges? Sometimes these surprises might even feel like déjà vu, because you might have sensed something was coming but did not think it was so imminent that you had to confront it.

You might be surprised by my choice of words, but new technologies or new ways of doing things must be confronted. It is difficult to confront something when it is so close that you have little manoeuvring space or viable options. Some problems and situations are best assessed from a distance.

How can we confront technologies at a safer distance so that we have more time to decide how to manoeuvre?

One strategy is to move closer to areas where new ideas are being tested or changes are happening more quickly. Since exploring multiple sources of potential technological advances may be necessary, forming several small teams to investigate different horizons could be practical.

A technology scouting team must be deliberately composed. Sending a group of enthusiasts to a trade fair will not produce the kind of intelligence that instils confidence in your organisation's ability to prepare for the future. Sure, the team should include an enthusiast or geek, but also an analyst (who gathers data and information), an operations expert (with knowledge of current operational requirements and performance), and someone who understands either our suppliers or our clients. The key is that the team should not only gather information but also interpret it or build a case based on their observations. It would also be ideal if they could identify which competencies or network relations we need to develop to better prepare for what lies ahead, and what it may mean for clients, suppliers, and specialised providers we depend on. With this information, the leadership team will be in a much stronger position to decide where to strategically invest in new skills or partnerships.

A horizon can be explored through various methods, such as desktop research, participating in webinars, or even travelling to conferences or visiting interesting demonstration or research sites. Scanning a horizon does not need to take days or weeks; even a brief assessment can give a leadership team some indication of how closely a source of potential threats or opportunities should be monitored or engaged with.

Larger organisations often even send several teams to a horizon, where they then compete with their interpretations of what they saw. This internal idea market provides leadership with a clearer sense of which paths to pursue and which to avoid.

The horizons we explore could also be places where new regulations are being introduced, strict new standards are being adopted, new business models are being tested, or unconventional solutions are being applied to longstanding problems.

Which of the distant horizons does your team need to get closer to?

On which horizons are developments brewing that your organisation should be much more aware of to avoid being caught off guard?

The images used for this blog were generated using Canva AI with the following prompt:

Create a picture where a male geek, female analyst, and scientist scout a distant horizon for information about technological developments that are hard to imagine in the present. They record their observations on an ipad or a notebook. The scientist is measuring something in the distance.