In January 2026, sociologist and futurist Carina Stöttner founded Futurewise Company. The consultancy works across Europe, helping executive boards and leadership teams stay strategically capable of acting in a climate of permanent uncertainty.
Futurewise runs executive offsites, builds futures thinking projects aimed at opening up new growth areas, and carries out strategy reviews. The goal is to give companies orientation in complex situations — without false certainty, but with a clear basis for making decisions.
The starting point was the upheaval of recent years: the pandemic, geopolitical conflict, the energy crisis, inflation and fragile supply chains. In that environment, Stöttner argues, optimizing existing business models is no longer enough. Growth increasingly emerges where uncertainty is greatest — and those are precisely the spaces companies need to open up in a structured way.
Through scenario work and futures thinking, Futurewise creates space for decisions: room to think through possible futures systematically and weigh strategic options against them. The focus is on resilience as a precondition for new growth — not as retreat, but as a deliberate opening toward future markets and business models.
The Bavarian Tourism Day 2025 was all about working together. Under the theme “From Talking to Doing: Cooperation as a Success Factor in Tourism”, one thing came through clearly: turning good ideas into lasting action only works collectively.
Carina Stoettner delivered the keynote, “Zeitenwende? A Society in Change,” inviting the audience to see change as an opportunity rather than a threat. The more complex our environment becomes, she argued, the more we need shared responsibility and new kinds of community.
The questions she explored:
➡️ Which social challenges do we have to overcome today in order to build a future worth living in?
➡️ What are the essential pillars of trust?
➡️ How can the “quiet majority” get louder — and why does that matter so much?
➡️ And how, in an age of AI and social media bubbles, do we get back to emphasizing what we have in common rather than what divides us?
Practical examples from Bavaria and beyond — Trans Bayerwald, the Übergangshaus Lübeck, the AzubiTopHotels and the Donaulimes museum network — showed vividly how cooperation works in practice and what it can achieve.
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Warm thanks to Barbara Radomski and the whole BayTM team for the invitation, to host Helena Felixberger for guiding the day with such charm — and to everyone who took part for the conversations along the way.
Photos: tourismus.bayern — Florian Trykowski
In einer Welt voller Unsicherheit, technologischer Sprünge und gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche wird eine Frage für Unternehmen zentral: Wie kann man heute kluge Entscheidungen für ein Morgen treffen, das man nicht kennt? Strategisches Foresight bietet keine Vorhersage – sondern eine methodisch fundierte Herangehensweise, um Zukünfte zu explorieren, Komplexität zu strukturieren und unter Unsicherheit Orientierung zu finden.
In diesem Beitrag beantworte ich fünf der häufigsten Fragen zum Thema – kompakt und praxisnah.
Strategisches Foresight ist die strukturierte Auseinandersetzung mit möglichen, wahrscheinlichen und wünschenswerten Zukünften. Es geht nicht darum, die Zukunft vorherzusagen, sondern darum, mehrere Zukünfte zu explorieren und zu verstehen, wie sich Systeme verändern können.
Die EU sagt: “Foresight is the discipline of exploring and anticipating future possible developments to shape the preferable future.”
Foresight nutzt qualitative und quantitative Methoden, um:
Foresight ist ein Denk- und Reflexionsraum, der Organisationen ermöglicht, unter Unsicherheit klüger zu entscheiden. Einen guten Guide für den Beginn und eine Übersicht über Tools bietet das UN-Futureslab.
| Klassische Strategiearbeit | Strategisches Foresight |
|---|---|
| Lineare Planung | Denken in Alternativen, Szenarien |
| Fokus auf Optimierung | Fokus auf ungedachte Möglichkeiten |
| Orientierung an Vergangenheit und Ist-Zustand | Orientierung an möglichen Zukunftsdynamiken |
| Reaktion auf bekannte Trends | Antizipation von Wandel und Emergenz |
| Ziel: Kontrolle und Planung | Ziel: Orientierung und Handlungsfähigkeit |
Foresight erweitert die klassische Strategiearbeit – und macht sie zukunftsfähig in einer Welt, in der Kontrolle allein nicht mehr ausreicht.
Diese Begriffe werden oft verwechselt – dabei erfüllen sie unterschiedliche Rollen:
Foresight fragt nicht „Was wird passieren?“, sondern:
Was könnte passieren?
Was wollen wir möglich machen und was verhindern?
In Zeiten von Umbruch und Unsicherheit brauchen Unternehmen mehr als operative Exzellenz – sie brauchen Zukunftskompetenz. Foresight hilft, …
Foresight ist keine Spielerei – sondern eine zentrale Fähigkeit für resiliente, lernende Organisationen.
Foresight ist kein Bauchgefühl, sondern ein methodisch strukturierter Prozess, der je nach Zielstellung angepasst wird. Zu den wichtigsten Methoden gehören:
Foresight-Methoden lassen sich flexibel mit Innovationsprozessen, Strategieentwicklung und Change-Programmen verknüpfen.
The future can’t be predicted — but it can be shaped. To help companies build resilience in a complex world, I work with established and emerging methods from futures research. The question at the center is always the same: how do you turn what we know today into decisions that hold up tomorrow?
Here’s an overview of the methods I and the Futurewise Company work with regularly.
What is the Delphi method?
Delphi is a qualitative method used in futures research. Over several rounds, experts from different fields are systematically asked to assess how the future might develop. The method was developed at the RAND Corporation and takes its name from the ancient oracle at Delphi.
The first step is in-depth interviews with a selected panel of experts (15 to 35 people). I condense what they say into hypotheses, which go back to the panel anonymously in a second round for assessment. What emerges is a well-grounded picture of possible developments.
What is Delphi good for?
In practice
I reach for Delphi when I want to go deeper with a leadership team: where are the future growth opportunities for their company, and where are new risks emerging? We talk to politicians, academics, potential customers and consumers, and also to other entrepreneurs and start-ups. We go into those conversations together and try to understand where the real ruptures are happening. What makes it interesting is that most of what comes out of it isn’t in the headlines or the reports. These interviews give us a direct look into the engine room, or behind the closed doors where political decisions get made.
What is scenario analysis?
Scenarios are narrative, plausible futures built from assumptions, drivers and uncertainties. They help companies understand different paths ahead and make strategic decisions that hold up across more than one of them.
Originally coined by Herman Kahn and famously used by Shell to navigate the oil crisis, the method lets you play developments through and see what they would mean for your business model.
What are scenarios good for?
In practice
There are dozens of ways to build scenarios. In the video below I explain three of them briefly. Simple approaches like the 2×2 matrix work well with clients when we want to think a specific question through efficiently from several directions: what happens if our customer segment’s purchasing power keeps growing — and what if it stalls? What if demand for technology X stays niche — and what if it turns into a mass market? It’s a fast, straightforward way to play out different developments. When a discussion inside a team is getting heated, it particularly helps everyone step back and look at all the possible directions as objectively as they can.
What is backcasting?
Backcasting doesn’t start in the present but in a future worth having. From there we work systematically backwards, deriving the steps that lead to it. That opens up radically different perspectives and breaks through mental blocks.
I work with leadership teams to define a clear picture of the future, then develop short-, medium- and long-term strategies from it together.
What is backcasting good for?
In practice
Talking about the future generates plenty of good ideas. The problem is that back in the here and now, nobody in the operating business suddenly has time to work on long-term topics as well. Backcasting is a great way to show that if we haven’t delivered Y by point X, the vision we developed won’t become reality. It creates accountability and breaks a big vision down into manageable, actionable steps.
What is the Futures Triangle?
The Futures Triangle, developed by Sohail Inayatullah, analyzes three forces that shape any future:
The method helps make visible the tensions within which strategic decisions actually play out.
What is the Futures Triangle good for?
In practice
“We discussed this three years ago and it didn’t work then, so now it’s off the table.” I hear some version of that in every company I work with. This method is well suited to making those beliefs visible and asking why they exist in the first place. And it applies not only to the past and present but to the future too. Take hyped trends: they can be seductive, and plenty of companies jump straight on board. But is it hype or a long-term opportunity? The Futures Triangle helps you look at that more closely.
What is a Futures Wheel?
The Futures Wheel, developed by Jerome C. Glenn, is a visual thinking tool for systematically mapping the direct and indirect consequences of an event or a trend.
At the center sits a single impulse — a technological innovation, for example. From there we work outward in concentric rings through first-, second- and third-order effects.
What is the Futures Wheel good for?
In practice
Anyone can think a single trend through: AI will take over a large share of graphic design work. The Futures Wheel helps you think one step further. Does that mean those jobs become redundant — and if so, which parts of them? Or does it mean a graphic designer can now handle ten commissions a day instead of one, and eventually has to, because clients increasingly expect lower prices? And if that’s right, being a graphic designer means becoming an AI tool manager running ten tasks in parallel. Which means I need people who can handle that simultaneity. The pressure in the job goes up, and so do the demands on how people think. What does that mean for managing staff, for burnout rates, for how agencies distribute work? A Futures Wheel helps you follow developments like that all the way through.
What is a trend radar?
A trend radar is a structured analytical tool that captures, assesses and visualizes relevant trends and weak signals for use in strategy work. Trends are positioned according to their relevance and their level of uncertainty.
I build trend radars for sectors, technologies or specific questions — the future of work, of industry or of sustainability, for instance.
What is a trend radar good for?
Not sure which method fits your question best? I’m happy to help you choose one and put it into practice.
