Act Before the Signal: The Real Practice of Foresight
- Selase Dugbaza
- Jul 11, 2025
- 2 min read
We often know the truth. It sits in the palm of our hands, but we don't close our fingers around it, in case it disturbs our comfortable reality.
Being future-ready isn't knowing what's changing. It's not being ready to avert overwhelm, overload or breakdown.
Being future-ready is living the desired future, now. There's no waiting for signs. There's no waiting for permission.
Foresight Exists in Alignment, Not Prediction
We talk about foresight like it's prediction, or the ability to see what's coming, to see what others don't see. Real foresight, though, isn't seeing the future; it's not betraying what we already know.
If you know what you want, foresight is the discipline of acting in alignment with it, to avoid ending up with what you don't. The gap between what we claim to want, and what we actually do is the space foresight seeks to close, or better yet, prevent from forming at all.
The logic is simple: the future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we create, or allow, moment by moment. Yes, events may occur, but states accumulate.
Most drift, misalignments, or decay doesn't begin with bad intentions. It begins with compromise, delay, or the transfer of responsibility to some future time, person or group. We avoid knowing and naming what we want, to avoid standing for it.
Meanwhile, reality moves, not with noise, not with a warning, but with impolite motion that refuses to signal in advance.
By the time the signal comes, the shift has gathered momentum. It will not be easily seduced from its course. In that moment, foresight, handcuffed to lag, can only pick up the tailcoat of momentum's surge.
What matters most, then, isn't prediction, or even preparedness; it's clarity about what we want, commitment to act on it, and alignment between what we want and what we do.
That's why real foresight requires autonomy, because when something unexpected or undesirable happens, you need to act, without waiting, without asking.
Individual impacts vary. Pain is personal. There is no standard threshold for when to act. You move when the gap between what is, and what you want is too great to ignore.
Autonomy makes fluid response possible, and seeking alignment ensures we act towards shared goals. It removes the fear that autonomy leads to chaos.
Together, autonomy and alignment close the gap between what we want and what we have.
Autonomy and alignment offer speed of response and coherence.
Autonomy and alignment are the real uses of foresight.
To apply this, ask your team:
What are we tolerating that contradicts what we want?
What risk is quietly accumulating through what we allow?
What decision could we make now to realign ourselves with what we want?
It's not clairvoyance. It's foresight. It's strategy that lives in the now.
Closing Reflection
Even when we act with clarity, we con't control everything. Others will do things, entropy will change things, surprises will come.
That's not a failure of foresight. It's the nature of life in a living system.
Real foresight includes the freedom to adapt, to course correct, to respond without panic.
If we seek alignment, autonomy need not tear us apart.
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