Futures Thinking — Stoettner at the Vodafone Future Day
At the Vodafone Future Day, Carina Stoettner spoke about why thinking about the future has become a core leadership discipline — and what so often stands in the way. The brain, she explained, tends to think short-term and to register risks more strongly than opportunities — a mechanism that makes strategic action difficult in uncertain times.
Her work with leadership teams, she said, isn’t about predicting the future but about learning to work with uncertainty — because the uncertainty isn’t going anywhere. She showed which cognitive tendencies (the negativity bias among them) shape how we think about what’s ahead, how far out it makes sense to look, and why scenario thinking is such an effective tool for making complexity manageable.
The future, in Stoettner’s framing, isn’t a fixed point but a space to think in: sketch out several possible futures instead of clinging to a single truth, and you get your ability to act back.
Earlier in the day, Prof. Heiko von der Gracht offered a look at the scientific side of foresight work. He made clear that futures research isn’t fortune-telling: it rests on systematic observation, scenarios and the interpretation of signals. The future doesn’t arrive by accident, he argued — it can be explored methodically, by analyzing trends, wildcards and possible ruptures in a structured way.
