Quotes About Foresight

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. Churchill, speech in the House of Commons (1940)

Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line.

At the same time, as Yamashita points out, it's just as important to look forward when asking big questions about purpose. He urges clients to work on Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says, because it requires "envisioning a version of the company that does not exist yet.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.

A number of people I talked to had predicted it. He was very detail-oriented

Some people skate to the puck. I skate to where the puck is going to be.

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been

It's easy to look back and see it, and it's easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.

If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.

Good intelligence wins battles long before the first arrow is shot or the first sword is drawn from its scabbard.

premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance.

But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "unknown unknowns

In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn't stand a chance.

Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak.

In such cases, the greatest responsibility for avoiding the planning fallacy lies with the decision makers who approve the plan. If they do not recognize the need for an outside view, they commit a planning fallacy.

objective ignorance accumulates steadily the further you look into the future.

We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather

If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But fi a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition?

One thing about pessimism is that it feels sane. Pessimists are those who can't be taken in, people who can't be fooled. I told you so. But it is also a habit of mind. It reconciles us to being powerless. It justifies detachment, indifference. It is even fear of having power....

Preparing for war, as was well known in other lands but perhaps not then in that one, is usually a self-fulfilling precaution.