Stop Writing Vision Statements: Why Strategic Foresight Still Beats Hope
- Dr. John Dentico
- Nov 26, 2025
- 3 min read
Most companies confuse vision with foresight, and it's costing them their future. In their landmark book Competing for the Future, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad warned us: "Vision is what you declare in boardrooms; foresight is what you earn through disciplined scanning of how industries actually evolve.” Vision is an apparition, a desired future conjured from hope and aspiration.
Foresight is constructed from observable trends, emerging technologies, and shifting customer behaviors happening right now. "But here's the irony, their own framework trapped companies in the very backward-looking thinking they meant to escape. Firms optimized their "core competencies" until those competencies became anchors, not advantages. The problem is clear: focus too hard on what made you great yesterday, and you'll miss what's changing today. Strategic thinking fixes this, not by picking better competencies, but by building the organizational muscle to question, adapt, and rethink continuously. Which is precisely what most companies aren't doing right now, and why employee engagement just hit a ten-year low.
They're still writing vision statements when they should be building foresight capacity, and their people know it. The 2025 Benevity State of Corporate Purpose report (benevity.com/state-of-corporate-purpose-2025) exposes the damage. Despite 88% of leaders claiming their impact strategies are "futureproofing" their business, employee engagement has cratered to levels not seen since 2014. Over half of corporate social responsibility leaders are ready to quit due to burnout. The pattern is clear: companies are reacting to political winds instead of operating from strategic conviction.
They're choosing caution over courage because they never did the foundational work, the foresight work, of understanding what they actually stand for and whether their people share those values. Prahalad and Hamel told us to compete for industry foresight; today's companies can't even compete for internal coherence. They hire for skills without assessing values alignment, then act surprised when people disengage six months later. This isn't a retention problem. It's a strategy problem masquerading as an HR issue.
So what does real strategic thinking look like? Not the kind that produces glossy vision statements and three-year plans that go stale in six months. The kind that builds organizational foresight as a continuous capability, not a one-time exercise.
It starts with asking uncomfortable questions: What risks might we encounter? What gets in the way of our mission? What does our mission statement say, and is it simple enough for people to remember and cite it? What are we good at, and is that still what the market needs? What do our people genuinely value, and does that align with how decisions get made here? Where is our industry headed, and are we positioned to lead or just survive?
Most organizations never ask these questions systematically because the answers might require changing course, and change is more complicated than writing another vision statement. Strategic thinking isn't about having better answers; it's about building the muscle to keep asking better questions. It's the difference between declaring what you want the future to look like and doing the hard work of understanding what the future is likely to demand. Prahalad and Hamel called this foresight. Thirty years later, it seems, most companies still haven't built it.
The companies that survive the next decade won't be the ones with the most inspiring vision statements. They'll be the ones who built foresight into their operating system, who taught their people to scan, question, and adapt faster than the competition. This is what strategic thinking delivers: not certainty about the future, but the organizational capability to navigate uncertainty without losing coherence. The Benevity data shows us what happens when you skip this work. Disengagement. Burnout. Leaders reacting instead of leading.
You can't vision-statement your way out of that. You must think your way through it. And that starts with admitting most of what passes for strategy today is just dressed-up hope.
Foresight isn't built in planning sessions. It's built in the daily discipline of asking hard questions and listening to the answers, even when they're uncomfortable. Even when they reveal problems that look too hard to solve. Too many leaders see what the work requires and decide it's easier to hope the problem resolves itself, that somehow, they'll be the exception. They won't be. The organizations that thrive are the ones that stopped hoping and started thinking.
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