By: Dr Stavroula Kalogeras, MBA Programme Director, Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University DubaiÂ
Leaders frequently find themselves making decisions without having all the facts. Market conditions change, new technologies emerge, customer needs shift, and competitors act before their full impact is evident. The real challenge isn’t just missing information; it’s making sense of signals that are partial, unclear, and constantly changing.
This is where foresight becomes important.
Foresight is frequently misunderstood as the ability to predict the future. In reality, it is something far more practical. It is the capacity to recognize emerging possibilities before they become obvious realities. Rather than forecasting a single outcome, foresight helps leaders identify patterns of change while they are still forming and consider how those patterns might shape future conditions.
The foundation of this capability lies in a space that is often overlooked in leadership practice: the in-between.
The in-between is the period between what is already understood and what is not yet fully known. It is the space where signals exist, but meaning has not yet settled, where competing interpretations remain possible, and where the future has not yet been reduced to a single narrative. It is neither certainty nor confusion. Rather, it is a transitional state in which understanding is still taking shape.
This space has been described in earlier work as “betwixt and between,” a liminal condition in which meaning is neither fully formed nor fully absent. In this article, the term “the in-between” is used to refer to the same phenomenon, with a more explicit focus on its role in organizational interpretation and strategic foresight.
Most organizations encounter the in-between every day. A shift in customer behaviour appears before sales figures change. New technologies begin altering expectations before they disrupt existing business models. Employees express concerns informally before engagement surveys reflect them. At first, these signals rarely present themselves as clear evidence. They appear as fragments that do not yet fit established explanations.
The challenge is that organizations are not naturally designed to remain in this state for long.
Leadership systems tend to reward clarity, alignment, and decisiveness. Executives are expected to provide direction, managers are expected to implement decisions, and teams are expected to execute with confidence. These expectations are necessary for performance, but they also create pressure to settle on explanations quickly. Ambiguity becomes something to eliminate rather than something to learn from.
As a result, organizations often move rapidly from uncertainty to certainty, sometimes before sufficient understanding has emerged. Once a plausible interpretation takes hold, it begins to shape how subsequent information is viewed. New data is filtered through existing assumptions. Contradictory signals receive less attention. Alternative possibilities gradually disappear from consideration.
This process can create a subtle but significant leadership risk. The organization becomes increasingly confident in its understanding of reality while becoming less sensitive to emerging change.
The issue is not that leaders ignore information. In many cases, they are surrounded by more information than ever before. The challenge is that meaningful change rarely announces itself through established metrics. It first appears as weak signals-small anomalies, unexpected behaviours, emerging trends, and peripheral observations that do not yet seem important.
Foresight begins with the ability to notice these signals before they become obvious.
This perspective sits within the broader field of strategic foresight, which includes scenario planning, environmental scanning, and weak signal analysis. However, most approaches in this field focus on methods for exploring the future or frameworks for structuring it.
Less attention is given to the interpretive space in which foresight actually forms; the moment before meaning stabilizes into scenarios, decisions, or strategic direction.
This article refers to that space as the in-between.
This is why the in-between matters. It is the environment in which weak signals can still be observed before dominant interpretations crowd them out. It is the space where leaders can explore multiple explanations, test assumptions, and consider a range of possible futures before committing to a single understanding of events.
The value of remaining in the in-between is not that it eliminates uncertainty. Rather, it allows uncertainty to become informative.
When leaders remain open to ambiguity for long enough, they begin to see connections that would otherwise remain hidden. Patterns emerge across seemingly unrelated observations. Assumptions become visible. Risks and opportunities that lie beyond current performance indicators are starting to take shape. What initially appeared as isolated events gradually reveals itself as evidence of broader change.
This is the essence of foresight. It is not a prediction. It is pattern recognition before consensus forms.
Consider the early stages of digital transformation across many industries. Long before digital disruption became an accepted reality, organizations were receiving signals that customer expectations were changing. Consumers were experimenting with new channels, new technologies were reducing barriers to entry, and traditional business models were beginning to show signs of strain. Yet many organizations interpreted these developments as isolated events rather than indicators of systemic change. By the time the pattern became undeniable, the opportunity to respond proactively had narrowed significantly.
The difference was not access to information. The signals were visible. The difference was whether leaders remained open to emerging interpretations long enough to recognize what those signals collectively represented.
This highlights an important distinction between foresight and prediction. Prediction seeks certainty about what will happen. Foresight seeks awareness of what might happen. Prediction attempts to identify the most likely future. Foresight explores multiple futures and prepares organizations to respond effectively as conditions evolve.
For leaders, this distinction matters because the future is inherently uncertain. Strategic advantage rarely comes from accurately predicting events years in advance. More often, it comes from recognizing change earlier than others and adapting before that change becomes obvious.
Developing this capability requires a different relationship with uncertainty. Rather than rushing to resolve ambiguity, leaders must learn to work productively within it. They must cultivate curiosity alongside decisiveness, maintaining enough openness to continue learning even as decisions are made.
This does not mean delaying action indefinitely. Organizations must still move forward. The challenge is to avoid confusing coherence with certainty. A compelling explanation may be internally consistent while still missing important dimensions of what is emerging. Foresight requires leaders to hold their interpretations lightly enough that new signals can still reshape them.
Ultimately, the future first appears in the in-between.
Before trends become measurable, before disruptions become visible, and before opportunities become obvious, there is a period in which change exists only as a possibility. It is within this space that foresight operates. Leaders who can remain there long enough to observe, question, and interpret are often the ones who recognize the future before others do.
The in-between is therefore not a place of indecision or uncertainty to be escaped. It is a strategic leadership environment where emerging futures can be detected, understood, and shaped. Foresight begins not when the future is clear, but when leaders are willing to stay open long enough to see what is beginning to emerge.
