Anticipatory Planning How to Prepare for What’s Coming Before It’s Urgent

13 Apr 2026 · 2 min

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In this talk, the speaker frames anticipatory planning as the most practical component of strategic foresight. The core idea is that individuals and teams must ready their thinking—not just project plans—for future disruptions that arrive before they become urgent. Because innovation cycles are accelerating and unknown challenges loom, the speaker argues that preparation hinges on developing specific competencies: acquiring new skills, staying agile, and avoiding over‑commitment in calendars, workloads, and mental bandwidth. Maintaining physical and psychological health within the team is presented as essential to preserve margin and capacity, enabling rapid response when unexpected opportunities or crises arise. The overall message is that true preparedness involves both skill development and safeguarding personal and collective well‑being to create the space needed for swift adaptation.

Chapters

anticipatory planning. And this is probably the most practical of these competencies because we can all do this. We all know that this needs to be done, but it's still a subset of strategic foresight and futures thinking because we need to be able to prepare before the pressure arrives. And the preparing isn't just for the project. The preparing is preparing our thinking for this. So, for example, we know that we need new skills for the future. We know that there is new things that we need to learn, and we're going to need to respond, and we're going to need to be agile, and disruptions could happen very quickly, and innovation cycles are shorter than they ever have been. And we get, you know, we can get anxious about all of those things, and we cannot actually prepare for all of those things because we don't know what they are yet. So how— pardon me— how do we prepare? Well, we prepare by developing these competencies. We prepare by not overcommitting in our calendars or in our lives or in our brains to too many projects so that we're able to respond faster to new opportunities. We prepare by making sure that the people in our team are healthy physically and psychologically. That our team is healthy so that when these disruptions happen, we've got margin, we've got space, we've got capacity to be able to respond. So sometimes it's not just the practical thing that we know is coming, but it's actually the preparedness, the preparedness for what is next.