Who Gets to Claim the Future?

The most powerful strategic decision in your organisation has already been made.

It is the future you believe is inevitable.

Not the plan. Not the priorities. Not the transformation programme.

The future you assume is coming.

Every strategy rests on an imagined tomorrow. Most of the time, tomorrow is not examined. It is imported. AI will restructure the sector. Demographic change makes centralisation unavoidable. Digital is the only route to growth. Efficiency is non-negotiable.

These statements sound rational. Objective. Data-driven.

They are not forecasts.

They are anticipations. And anticipation is where strategic agency is won or lost before anyone enters the room.

The Production of Inevitability

Futures do not arrive neutrally. They are produced.

Governments fund certain research directions. Technology firms promote particular visions. Consultancies package trends into urgent imperatives. Media amplifies. Over time, these narratives harden. They stop sounding like arguments and start sounding like physics.

Adams, Murphy, and Clarke call these regimes of anticipation: collectively shared ways of thinking about the future that pre-structure what feels possible, urgent, or unavoidable. They determine which developments are considered relevant before any organisation-specific analysis begins. Annette Markham took this further with the concept of discursive closure: the process by which certain futures are made to seem inevitable, value-free, and routine, until people lose sight of where those assumptions originated and what interests they serve.

Inside organisations, these regimes are rarely questioned. They are absorbed. Leaders say, “We have no choice.” That sentence should make you deeply uncomfortable.

When strategy becomes compliance with a dominant future narrative, you are not shaping your environment. You are being shaped by it.

This is not the same as responding intelligently to change. It is surrendering the question of which changes matter and how to respond before it has been properly asked.

Identity Is a Claim on Tomorrow

In previous writing, I argued that identity constrains strategy. We cannot choose futures that contradict who we believe we are. What an organisation repeatedly does in response to its environment shapes what it can do next. Identity is earned through action, not declared through language.

But there is something deeper.

Identity is not only about the past. It is a claim on the future.

When an organisation says “we are a heritage institution,” “we are operationally disciplined,” or “we are customer-obsessed,” it is not just describing itself. It is narrowing the set of futures that feel legitimate.

Some options feel natural. Others feel it is inappropriate. Dangerous. Out of character. This is what makes identity powerful. It does not forbid alternatives. It makes them feel wrong.

Strategy then becomes the extension of identity into the future. But here is the problem: identity itself is shaped by the futures we import from outside.

If an organisation absorbs the dominant narrative that AI will automate professional judgement, and its identity is built around analytical rigour, the combination creates a trap. The external regime and the internal identity point to the same destination. Alternatives become not just difficult but illegitimate.

This is how organisations lose strategic agency without noticing, not through a single decision, but through the quiet alignment of what they assume about the world and what they assume about themselves.

Clarity as Closure

In my piece on strategic ambiguity, I argued that clarity can become rigidity. Over-specification locks in assumptions that will be wrong within weeks. It compels the organisation to defend a story about the future rather than updating in response to reality.

There is another layer.

Clarity often locks in a preferred future without anyone recognising the lock.

When a leadership team declares a clear destination, it is not merely an alignment activity. It is closing alternatives. The clearer the picture of the future, the harder it becomes to ask whether that future was ever chosen deliberately.

Was it examined? Or was it inherited?

The danger is not ambiguity. The danger is premature certainty. Once a future is framed as inevitable, dissent feels irresponsible. Doubt feels disloyal. Alternative orientations feel unrealistic.

Clarity becomes closure.

The Map Shapes What You Can Imagine

In Have You Lost Your Map, I argued that dashboards are not terrain. They filter, simplify, and distort. Leaders who manage through metrics alone lose touch with the ground.

But dashboards do more than obscure reality. They narrow imagination.

If you measure efficiency, you imagine efficient futures. If you measure risk exposure, you imagine risk avoidance. If you measure compliance, you imagine compliant organisations.

Data does not just describe the present. It shapes the horizon.

This matters because most organisations believe they are being empirical when, in fact, they are reinforcing a particular future narrative. The metrics were chosen within an existing regime of anticipation. They encode assumptions about what matters. They make certain futures visible and others invisible.

Perceptual complexity is not only about seeing what is happening now. It is about seeing what could happen. If your map contains only one plausible future, you have already surrendered optionality.

Strategic Anticipatory Capture

There is a pattern I see repeatedly.

An organisation adopts a dominant industry narrative. It embeds it in strategy documents. It aligns capital allocation behind it. It restructures around it. Then it tells itself it is being realistic.

I call this strategic anticipatory capture.

It is when an organisation internalises a dominant future narrative and mistakes it for objective reality. The external regime of anticipation and the internal identity reinforce each other until the organisation cannot distinguish between insight and assumption.

The symptoms are familiar.

“This is just where the market is going.” “We cannot ignore this trend.” “Everyone is moving this way.”

Sometimes they are right. Markets do shift. Technologies do disrupt. However, the deeper question often goes unasked.

Who benefits from this future being framed as inevitable? And what alternatives have we ruled out without noticing?

Consider how ageing populations are framed in policy and strategy documents. An economic burden. A strain on healthcare. A productivity challenge. The technological answer follows almost automatically: data-driven monitoring, care automation, and predictive analytics.

It feels coherent. Logical. Necessary.

But embedded in that narrative are assumptions about risk, control, autonomy, and value that were never debated. Once the frame is accepted, other futures become harder to articulate. Community-based interdependence. Redesigned work across life stages - reimagined contribution beyond productivity.

If the future is defined narrowly, strategy follows narrowly. This is not simply a policy problem. Every organisation absorbs some version of the same dynamic. Strategy becomes aligned with a story that the organisation may never have consciously chosen.

Becoming What the Future Demands

Here is what makes anticipatory capture so insidious.

When you accept a particular future as inevitable, you do not just plan for it; you also internalise it. You begin to become the kind of organisation that fits it.

The anticipated future reshapes identity. Hiring changes. Investment priorities shift. Certain capabilities are developed; others atrophy. The organisation restructures itself around assumptions about what is coming. Over time, it becomes structurally coupled to a future it never consciously chose.

This is why the question I posed in earlier writing matters so much here:

If we take this strategic trajectory, what kind of organisation will we become in three years? And would we like what we become?

Most strategy processes skip this question entirely. They ask whether a direction is profitable, feasible, or aligned with market trends. They rarely ask what pursuing that direction will do to the organisation’s character, its capabilities, its identity.

But strategy is not just a bet on the future. It is a process of becoming. Every strategic choice reinforces certain ways of operating and lets others decay. The organisation you are in three years will be shaped by the futures you treat as real today.

If you accept uncritically that AI will replace professional judgment, you will start building an organisation optimised for that world. You will hire differently. You will invest differently. You will measure differently. And slowly, you will become an organisation that can only thrive if that particular future arrives.

What happens if it does not? Or if it arrives differently than expected?

An organisation that has reshaped itself around a single anticipated future has reduced its capacity to respond to any other. It has traded freedom of action for alignment with an assumption.

This is the biggest risk of anticipatory capture. Not that you plan for the wrong future, but that you become the wrong organisation for any future other than the one you assumed.

Reopening Strategic Agency

So what does this mean in practice?

First, treat every claim of inevitability as a strategic choice.

When someone says, “This is where the world is heading,” ask: According to whom? Based on which data? What would have to be true for this not to happen? Who gains if we accept this as given?

These are not cynical questions. They are strategic hygiene.

Second, separate orientation from prediction.

Strategy is not about guessing correctly. It is about preserving freedom of action across multiple plausible futures. That requires variety. It requires perceptual complexity. It requires resisting premature closure.

The goal is not to predict which future will arrive. It is to remain capable of acting well whichever one does.

Third, diversify who gets to imagine the future.

If only the top team defines plausibility, you will get a narrow horizon. If only technical experts define technological futures, you will get technological answers. If only finance defines constraints, you will get financially optimised futures.

Regimes of anticipation are sustained by who is allowed to speak about what is coming. Expanding participation is not democratic theatre. It is a source of requisite variety.

Fourth, ask the becoming question explicitly.

Before committing to a strategic direction, ask: What kind of organisation would we have to become to execute this well? And is that who we want to be?

If the answer is uncomfortable, that discomfort is data. It may indicate that the direction is incorrect. It may mean the identity needs to evolve. But it should never be ignored.

Finally, protect ambiguity deliberately.

Not vagueness. Not indecision. But room for manoeuvre.

A strategy that specifies only one future is brittle. A strategy that acknowledges uncertainty without collapsing into paralysis is resilient. Strategic ambiguity is not the absence of direction. It is the preservation of options.

The Real Strategic Question

The most important strategic question is not: What is our plan?

It is: Which futures are we allowing to exist inside this organisation?

Because once a future is declared inevitable, the rest becomes execution. And execution without examination is compliance.

Strategy is not the management of plans. It is the management of which futures are permitted to shape action.

If you cannot question the assumed future, you have already lost your map. Not because you lack data, but because you have stopped asking whether the destination was ever yours to choose.