Executive Summary
Vigilant organizations stay current by searching for weak signals of threats and opportunities—outliers that hint of what’s to come; taking time to figure out what they mean through probing and monitoring; and then making small bets early to learn more and gain a favorable position in the marketplace. Vigilant organizations can excel if they:
- Exercise vigilant leadership through deep curiosity, openness to diverse inputs, and emphasis on the long term.
- Adopt flexible and adaptive strategy-making processes that feature “outside-in” and “future-back” approaches and allow for the investigation of outliers.
- Invest systematically in foresight activities and small-scale experimentation, while deploying flexible, real-option approaches.
- Institute coordination and accountability for acting on weak signals, enabled by decentralization and an organizational alertness to share information broadly.
Sponsors
![](https://d3pbwvo698qpuh.cloudfront.net/content/uploads/logos/logo-pscu.png?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=clip&q=80&w=1120&s=911f911e073d25d6f52704ad85ef557e)
![](https://filene.widen.net/content/aynefx8his/jpeg/American%20Airlines-logo.jpeg)
![](https://d3pbwvo698qpuh.cloudfront.net/content/uploads/logos/2018_BCU_Logo_CMYK.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=clip&q=80&w=1120&s=54a199b1fe814d7ecd19bd045302149e)