Can countertrends help ensuring foresight work influences decision-making?

In many organisations, the biggest challenge is not generating foresight. It is getting the right people to listen to the implications of the foresight for the decisions they take.

We can blame “broken systems” (siloed decision making, having one group doing foresight, another taking decisions etc.) or other problems (e.g. “the implications of the foresight work contradict the ideology of the government/the coalition agreement”), but that does not help. Our job is to have an impact. Rather than wishing the organisation (or individuals in it) were different, we should instead start with what is.

This is where countertrends could be interesting.

The coining of the term “countertrends”, at least in the sense it is being used here, was the invention of Matthias Horx et al[1]. But its use and definition have already taken on a life of their own. We can identify three types of countertrends:

• Newtonian countertrends imply a force moving in exactly the opposite direction to a known trend. Indeed, that are even created as a reaction to the trend itself. For instance, the trend to “globalisation” has generated an “anti-globalisation movement”. Initially this took the form of riots at the Seattle World Trade Organisation meeting, and a French farmer driving his tractor into McDonalds. More recently it takes the shape of a man with orange hair in the White House applying tariffs on other countries at the drop of a hat.
• Vector countertrends are different trends that are travelling at a tangent to the trend being examined, but which collide with it, and cause a change of direction in the original trend as a result. For instance, a demographic decline in industrialised nations has been predicted for a long time. But the speed and severity of the recent decline in birth rates is also attributable to other trends intersecting with it, like the decline in young people forming relationships, which in its turn is impacted by a marked and highly visible trend to extreme political polarisation among significant portions of the younger population, with young men trending to the extreme right, and young women to the extreme left.
• Exhaustion countertrends are simply when a trend has run its course. Although a trend may just “run out of steam” (remember the old belief that NATO had to be “out of area, or it would be out of business”. That trend certainly seems dead!). It may also simply be so successful that there is nowhere left for it to expand to! For instance, smart phones have become such a common phenomenon in most parts of the world, that it is hard to imagine how they can grow any further.

Countertrends build on trends. And many decisions are taken with the latest trends being explicitly or implicitly in the mind of the decider. For instance, they decide to invest in the latest in drone warfare, as the use and success of drones in modern warfare is so obvious.

But anybody conducting foresight will have to ask: will that last?  Rather than challenging a decision maker on this ground, it is likely much easier to find out, what are the assumptions being made in this decision?  Policy Horizons Canada runs sessions explicitly on surfacing assumptions made around a decision, and this is a very good place to start. As once the assumptions are on the table, it is then possible to ask the decider: but does the assumption hold true if this trend is changes?  Very likely they themselves will already realise that there are one or other form of countertrends impacting the trend they name. At the very least, a foresight strategist can then have the decider check if their plans would still be valid if this countertrend became dominant or seriously impacted the existing trend. The aim should not be to tell the decider “Ah ha, you got it wrong”. But rather to say, “Can we not change the decision a tiny bit, or add another element to the equation to make this a more robust option?” For instance, when taking the case of the trend to “drone warfare” what if the trends to “electronic warfare” and “cyber-attacks” became so strong that drones can be hacked and systematically turned against their supposed masters?  Would it not be a good idea also to identify ways to hide combatants from drones, as well as to invest in them?

As can be seen, the advantage of countertrends is KISS: keep it simple, stupid. There is no resort to creating entire scenarios of the future, for heavy lifting processes. They can be done rapidly and simply. Certainly, they require either access to the decider, or at least an understanding of the assumptions they are making, and the ability to interact with the decision-making process, but the cost in time and effort to this process is minimalised. And if the results bear fruit, little by little, it may be possible to generate a bigger appetite for foresight work in strategy among the deciders, as the relevance of the work is proven.

See also the full document: https://atelierdesfuturs.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Deftech__260611_Countertrends.pdf

[1] Matthias Horx, Lena Papasabbas, Nina Pfuderer, “15 Gegentrends: Wie die Zukunft ihre Richtung ändert”, 2024, The Future Project AG (Publisher).