Anticipatory foresight and adaptive decision-making as a crucial characteristic for business continuity, crisis and emergency leadership

Abstract

This paper reviews some of the common challenges to high-quality decision-making at the leadership level, such as limiting decision shortcuts, analytical blind spots, failure to consider multiple perspectives or options, and reluctance to adjust decisions that are not working well. The paper also reviews some of the pertinent literature and scholarship on decision-making approaches to build a summative decision-making model of anticipatory foresight and adaptation to overcome dysfunctional decision-making mistakes. The paper proposes a new framework that focuses on the internal decision-making processes that leaders should adopt — an approach to decision-making that combines the concepts of anticipatory foresight, predictive vision, creative imagination, adaptive skill sets and adaptive flexibility. It is essential to incorporate these dimensions in how we prepare leaders, equip and train them, create processes and protocols, and ultimately how we evaluate and assess leadership performance.