Even If You Knew the Future
Between insight and action, bureaucracy eats strategy for breakfast
Every time I give a talk, someone in the audience asks whether I can predict the future. I can’t. But I’ve stopped explaining why. Instead, I ask back: if I could tell you what the future holds, what would you do with it? And more to the point, what could you do with it?
We already possess a wealth of knowledge. We know that climate change is restructuring our environment and that demographics are shifting in ways that will hit entire industries within a decade. The knowledge is there. The ability to act on it is not.
I’ve spent almost 20 years doing foresight work. Futures reports, trend analyses, and scenario projects with senior leadership. The work was solid. The recommendations were specific. And almost nothing happened. Not because the insights were wrong, but because organizations are machines built to deliver on the present. Whatever is on fire this quarter gets the attention. Preparing for change? That is where organizations seize up. I’ve written about this before, and I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count.
This week, I watched it happen again.
What I heard at MobilityMove
I was in Berlin at MobilityMove, one of the largest public transport conferences in Germany. I gave the opening keynote for Kontiki, a conference-within-the-conference focused on AI and mobility. The context matters: public transport in Germany is facing a massive retirement wave. A significant portion of the workforce will leave within the next ten years. This industry doesn’t have the luxury of treating AI as an optional experiment. It needs all the help it can get from humans and machines to continue delivering the service it currently delivers.
My keynote covered the usual ground: the state of AI, the hype and how future narratives shape what gets built and what gets feared. Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize the themes. But the real insight came afterward, in conversations with people from the industry.
What they described, again and again, was this: trying to do even the most basic things with AI takes months. Every step requires approvals, risk assessments, compliance checks and coordination across departments that each operate on their own timelines and with their own logic.
One manager told me it took him four months to get his workers‘ council to approve a single employee attending an introductory AI training course. Four months for one person to attend one training course. That is the ratio of effort to outcome that people in these organizations are dealing with every day.
And I want to be clear about something: the people in IT, in legal, in data protection and in workers’ councils (for readers outside of Germany: Betriebsräte are elected employee representation bodies, and they have done tremendous work protecting workers‘ rights for decades) are doing their jobs. They are following the rules of a system that was built, over many years, around risk minimization and procedural thoroughness. That system served real purposes. But it now makes even the smallest experiment feel like pushing a boulder uphill.
Another manager told me he finds AI fascinating. He sees the potential. He just has zero time to engage with it. His days are consumed by meetings and firefighting. The irony is painful: AI tools could probably help him ease his workload, but he would need time to learn them first. And that time does not exist. The people who should be redesigning the system for the future cannot do it because the system eats all their bandwidth at present. When they do try, they rush, creating a hasty strategy deck and announcing a new initiative at a town hall. Everyone in the room is already aware that this initiative, like the previous three, will fade into obscurity in two weeks. The eye-rolls start before the presentation ends.
At some point during the conference, I said to someone,
“If I understand you all correctly, the way forward for your industry right now is not building more prototypes. It is unblocking the system that prevents your people from even trying. And that means focusing on IT, legal and workers’ councils first.”
I think this goes far beyond public transport. Healthcare, insurance, public broadcasting, legal, and others: the stories sound almost identical, especially here in Germany.
The real bottleneck
I’ve always believed that it is more effective to take down barriers than to push new initiatives. When you make it easy for people to try things and gain experience, they tend to move forward on their own. But right now, it is too hard to even try.
Vaughn Tan, in his newsletter The Uncertainty Mindset puts it in a way that I keep coming back to: “An organization’s ability to respond to external uncertainty is created by embracing internal uncertainty.” Bureaucratic systems are built to do the opposite: eliminate anything unpredictable. That is what approval chains and standardized processes are for. And that is precisely what makes them unable to adapt when the external world shifts.
Stanley McChrystal, in Team of Teams, provides the perfect metaphor for what this means in practice: stop thinking like a chess master and start thinking like a gardener. A chess master plans moves ahead and controls the board. But that only works when the game is legible. Right now, the board is changing faster than anyone can read it. A gardener cannot force a plant to grow. She can only tend the soil, pull the weeds, and trust the growing to happen on its own.
Here is what I keep observing: people want to engage. The common leadership line that employees are resistant or demotivated is too simple. The reality I keep hearing about is messier than that. People are exhausted from constant strategy pivots that lead nowhere. They are ground down by everyday barriers that make every small step feel like a negotiation. They have watched too many initiatives be announced with fanfare and quietly disappear. And underneath all of that, there are real fears and real anxieties about what AI means for their future.
What looks like resistance is usually exhaustion and anxiety. And when leadership misreads that as opposition, the response is predictable: more pressure, more urgency and more top-down mandates. Which produces more pushback. Which confirms the diagnosis. A cycle that feeds itself.
You can’t plan your way into the future
The world is changing too fast and too unpredictably for any strategy deck to capture it. Understanding the narratives that shape how we think about the future matters. But that understanding alone does not create the ability to act. What would help is less chess and more gardening. Reduce the procedural weight. Make it possible for people to try things without spending months on approvals. The ideas are there. So is the motivation. What is missing is room to move.
People can do this if you let them. But right now, they can’t. And honestly, most of them are very tired of trying.
Further Reading
Warum Impact Teams gegen Wände laufen (covolution, in German): Why dedicated innovation and future teams hit walls despite solid work and talented people. The article delves into the structural reasons that underlie the pattern I have described above.
The Beginning and the End of Foresight: My longer argument for why foresight insights rarely translate into organizational action, and what happens in the gap between the two.