I’ve spent the past two weeks in Kenya, and it’s been an amazing experience. Working in a different culture widens your perspective in all the best ways. As well as our client work, we also spent time with local communicators, and I even managed to fit in my first safari!

Much of our time was spent helping our clients build team capability in horizon scanning and scenario planning. As always, we approached it through our people-centred lens, exploring how to incorporate neuroscience, trust, storytelling, bias and narrative. The goal wasn’t just to identify future possibilities, but to equip leaders to communicate them with clarity, empathy and credibility.

Why horizon scanning matters

Horizon scanning feels especially relevant now, as our feeds fill with end-of-year IC trend reports. I read a lot of them, and while they are interesting, they tend to focus on what’s already happening and other than the rise of AI, most haven’t changed meaningfully in a decade. Trend reports are useful, but they describe the present, not the future.

Horizon scanning expands the lens. It pushes internal communicators to anticipate what the world of work may look like over a defined time horizon not just what employees are experiencing today. The world of work is shifting fast: new technologies, economic pressure, misinformation, and changing employee expectations all shape how people feel at work and how they interpret the messages they receive. These forces influence the trust they place in leaders, the stories they believe and the communication that resonates.

The role of scenario planning

Once you’ve scanned the horizon, you need a way to translate insight into action. That’s where scenario planning comes in. It allows you to rehearse multiple futures, optimistic, challenging and unexpected; and then to explore how employees might interpret each one. Who might feel anxious? Where might trust fracture? What stories could take hold? How could leadership communication support sense-making rather than fuel uncertainty?

Embedding foresight into internal communications planning

Horizon scanning and scenario planning cannot be an academic exercise you revisit once a year at an offsite. To be valuable, foresight must sit inside the IC planning rhythm itself. This is the kind of thinking internal communicators should be building into their quarterly planning and narrative development.

Horizon scanning isn’t a quick task, nor should it be. It works best when HR, technology and business teams contribute their insight, and many organisations involve external expertise to build capability and momentum. If this has piqued your interest, here are the five steps we use to use to structure the process:

Five steps to structure your horizon scanning process

1. Set clear objectives. Define the critical question you don’t yet know the answer to whether it relates to technology, workforce expectations or external forces such as politics or the economy.

2. Define your horizon. Choose your timeframe: short term (0-2 years); medium term (3-5 years) and long term

3. Identify sources and scan for signals. Use external data, internal people insights, employee listening, academic research, market intelligence and behavioural cues. Look for weak signals as well as dominant trends. Remember that signals come from both human factors (behaviour, sentiment, expectations) and non-human forces (technology, policy, economics, environment).

4. Make sense of emerging patterns. Analyse the signals to spot patterns, contradictions and emerging tensions. Look closely at what the data suggests and what’s missing. This is where narrative and behavioural science help you understand how people might interpret these shifts.

5. Turn insight into implementation. Translate findings into communication priorities, leadership narratives, scenario planning inputs and quarterly foresight reviews. Foresight becomes powerful only when it becomes routine.

Happy holidays to all!