What your strategy is built on and what is actually true now may no longer be the same thing.

Strategic Anticipation is the integrated practice of examining both. The foundations underneath. The conditions emerging ahead.

Two directions, one discipline.

Test Your Foundations
“The plan improved. I am not sure that the frame did.”
“I start to wonder if our forecasts are built for a world that has already moved on.”
“I’m not sure we have a clear read on either the past or the future right now.”

The feeling arrives before the explanation does. The strategy is sound on paper. The team is capable. The execution is disciplined. And yet something is not converting the way it should.

It shows up in two places at once. Looking back: decisions that seemed settled are producing results that don’t quite fit the reasoning behind them. Looking forward: the instruments you are using to read what’s coming feel calibrated to conditions that may have already changed.

These are not two separate problems. They are the same gap seen from two directions. That gap has a name. And it has a practice.

Connecting the dots — strategic pattern recognition

The Practice

Most engagements with this kind of problem produce a report, a framework, or a set of recommendations. They deliver an answer to a question the organisation asked about itself.

This is not that.

Strategic Anticipation is a practice, not a prescription. The work moves in sequence. Backward first, into what the strategy is actually standing on. Then outward, into what the world and market actually look like now. Then forward, into what that means for the decisions ahead.

The output is not a document. It is a leadership team that can examine its own thinking and keep doing it.

1

Archaeology

Inherited assumptions stop being visible as assumptions at all. They become process, budget logic, market definitions. The first movement excavates them , not to dismantle the strategy, but to find out what it is actually standing on.

2

Worldview

Assumptions can only be tested against reality as it actually is. The second movement goes there: customers and markets as they are now, and the wider operating environment. Not a forecast. A reconstruction of the world the strategy needs to connect to.

3

Reconstruction

The strategy is rebuilt against the reconstructed foundation and tested , not against a single expected future, but against conditions that are plausible, not just probable or preferable. Iterated until it holds. A position that can act from clarity regardless of which version arrives.

Two movements. One discipline.

Same leader. Same condition. Two different moments of recognition. Two doors into the same room.

Assumption Archaeology™

The return movement

For the leader looking at what they already have and sensing the foundations may not be as solid as they appear.

Anticipation Architecture™

The forward movement

For the leader looking ahead and sensing their instruments are reading conditions that may have already changed.

You go back to build forward. You test different futures before you commit to one.

The Anticipation Advantage™ names the gap between what the organisation says, what it does, what it believes.
And what the world now rewards.

Where to start

Assumption Archaeology Diagnostic

A private, self-administered instrument for senior leaders. Six minutes. No registration. No email. No identifiable data stored. Your results are immediate and seen only by you.

The output is not a score. It is a structured confrontation with the foundations your decisions are actually resting on. This is the first movement towards your Anticipation Advantage™.

Begin the diagnostic
6 minutes Fully anonymous No identifiable data stored Immediate results
Assumption Archaeology Diagnostic output

What the work sounds like

“She named something we had been working around for two years. Once it was named, the decision we had been avoiding became obvious.”
CEO, B2B technology company
“The diagnostic surfaced three assumptions we had treated as facts. Two of them no longer held. That was not a comfortable session. It was the most useful one we had had in years.”
Founder, Series B scale-up
“We thought the problem was execution. It wasn’t. The strategy was built on a description of our market that had simply expired.”
Chief Strategy Officer, PE-backed group
“For the first time we tested our strategy against futures we hadn’t chosen. What held across all of them became the foundation. What didn’t told us where we were exposed.”
COO, midcap consumer goods company
Sharon Greene

Sharon Greene

Twenty-five years of working at the intersection of foresight, strategy, and demand insight across household goods, fashion, technology, cybersecurity, and food and beverage. With leadership teams who carry the weight of decisions made under genuine uncertainty. Business unit leaders in larger corporations as well as CEOs and senior teams at midcap and scale-up organisations.

The practice that became Strategic Anticipation was not designed. It was excavated from that work. From the recurring discovery that the most consequential strategic problems were not about what leaders didn’t know. They were about what leaders had stopped questioning.

Sharon holds a background in design and an MBA, is based in Paris, and works internationally.

Sharon Greene

When you know what you are standing on, and what is coming, your next move is clear.

The examination goes in both directions. A conversation is where it starts.

Let’s talk

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