Strategic foresight and plausible scenarios in Cyber Security

July 15, 2025

Today’s threats evolve rapidly, demanding emerging technological solutions and solid strategic planning. With cyber risks becoming increasingly complex and dynamic, it’s crucial that organizations are equipped to anticipate and respond to these challenges. But are they truly prepared? How does this impact cyber resilience? And what influence does it have on decision-making?

Strategic foresight is not about predictions.

In the era of digital transformation that fuels global interconnection, Cyber Security remains a key concern for organizations, governments, and society as a whole. Malicious actors' growing capabilities demand a proactive security planning approach.

While traditional foresight relies on past data to predict future trends, patterns, and frameworks, strategic foresight explores a wide range of potential futures, helping develop anticipation, prevention, and preparedness capabilities.

This calls for constant vigilance, a mindset shift, and a willingness to rethink our approaches and operating models—to imagine, reimagine, and reinvent ourselves. Not just to endure, survive, and succeed, but to rise to the challenges ahead. This isn't just about the future; it’s about enabling us to do what we can and must do, here and now—demanding that we enhance and develop our future, exponential, and systemic thinking.

The role of strategic foresight in Cyber Security

The European Commission defines strategic foresight as the discipline that explores, anticipates, and shapes the future to help harness collective intelligence in a structured and systemic way to anticipate change. It proactively identifies trends, risks, emerging issues, and their possible implications and opportunities to provide valuable input for strategic planning, policymaking, and preparedness.

According to Michel Godet and Philippe Durance, one of the core principles of foresight is that building scenarios is not about predicting the future. Any form of prediction is, as they argue, a deception.

The future is not written—it is to be built. It is multiple, undetermined, and open to a wide variety of possible outcomes.

Organizations deploy various defensive controls—firewalls, encryption, and, in some cases, zero trust architectures—to protect their digital assets. However, the dynamic cyber threat ecosystem demands more than reactive defenses. A forward-looking approach grounded in cyber resilience is now an essential ally.

Scenario planning in Cyber Security

The primary goal of adopting a strategic foresight approach is to enhance decision-making in the present by anticipating future possibilities. For it to be truly effective, strategic foresight must be closely aligned with an organization’s mission and goals.

However, the benefits of this approach may not immediately be visible. That’s why strategic foresight implementation often hinges on effectively communicating insights, gaining stakeholder buy-in, and translating those insights into actionable plans.

This process requires commitment—to bridge the gap between foresight and tangible outcomes, ensuring that long-term planning translates into meaningful, practical action.

Scenario planning has become an indispensable approach to studying and communicating future paths' uncertainty and complexity.

My experience in strategic foresight enables me to develop defensive skills and thoroughly assess cyberattack forms and connotations. Uncertainty is an inherent trait in the security landscape, challenging the effectiveness of defensive controls to adapt to this emerging, complex, and disruptive paradigm.

Strategic foresight methods and techniques

Strategic foresight involves using frameworks and methodologies to anticipate future challenges and opportunities. Scenario planning, horizon scanning, and the Delphi method are among the key techniques employed. Scenario planning, for instance, involves constructing detailed narratives of different potential futures based on varying assumptions about key drivers and uncertainties.

In Cyber Security, scenario planning helps forecast how emerging technologies or geopolitical shifts might impact threats, enabling the development of robust defense strategies.

Scenarios are simulations of what the future could look like. Rather than attempting to predict exactly what will happen, they explore various possibilities by taking into account current trends, major shifts, emerging signals, unexpected events, and the broader context.

These scenarios help us to understand and prepare for a range of potential futures, guiding us through uncertainty and enabling better decision-making by illustrating what may lie ahead. By shaping strategies and developing impactful policies, scenarios become a key tool in improving our understanding of change and strengthening strategic approaches.

Plausible scenarios are those that could reasonably happen, based on what is happening today—here and now.

Illustration: Voros, J. (2003) A generic foresight process framework.

According to Joseph Voros in his foresight and anticipation process framework, he outlines examples of types of alternative future scenarios that may be seen, as he puts it, as nested sets or classes of the future, moving from broad to narrow perspectives. In his view, every future is a potential future—even those we can’t yet imagine.

Potential: All conceivable futures, representing the full spectrum of possibilities beyond the present moment, grounded in the belief that the future is open and undetermined.
Preposterous: Futures that seem absurd or impossible—often dismissed as unrealistic, yet valuable for exploring the outer limits of what could be.
Possible: Futures that could happen, based on knowledge or technologies that may be discovered or developed in time.
Plausible: Futures that could reasonably occur, grounded in our current understanding of physical laws, social dynamics, the environment, context, and other known factors.
Probable: Futures that are likely to happen, often extrapolated from current trends and data.
Preferable: Futures we want to see happen, based on our values and norms—frequently contrasted with undesirable outcomes.
Projected: The “default” or “business as usual” future, representing a continuation of current trends with no major changes.
Predicted: The future someone claims will happen, often with a high level of confidence.

The relevance of strategic foresight in Cyber Security today

In my current work in applied cybersecurity, combined with strategic foresight and the construction of plausible scenarios, these tools are essential for enhancing readiness and anticipation capabilities in the face of current and future threats.

By systematically analyzing potential future events, we can identify a wide range of emerging risks, thoroughly assess their potential impact, and design and test proactive mitigation strategies.

In practice, this approach goes beyond traditional risk management, which often focuses on known threats and historical data. Instead, it emphasizes adaptability and resilience, bearing in mind that the cybersecurity landscape—the attack surface, the exposure surface, and cyberspace itself—is dynamically evolving at an exponential rate.

Conclusion

Strategic foresight has a wide-reaching impact on Cyber Security, enabling organizations to prioritize investments, allocate resources more effectively, and foster a culture of learning, unlearning, and relearning that supports continuous adaptation. In today’s sophisticated and interconnected environment, anticipating and preparing for both today, now, and tomorrow—present and future—becomes a strategic advantage.

However, this approach also raises important questions about its implementation and effectiveness. How can organizations balance the need for thorough preparation with the risk of overpreparing for unlikely scenarios? What role should public-private collaboration play in developing and sharing strategic foresight?

These critical reflections underscore the importance of adopting foresight methodologies and rigorously evaluating and continuously improving their outcomes in response to the evolving threat landscape.