Strategic foresight
Strategic Foresight Intensive
Anticipate disruption, challenge assumptions and make better strategic decisions.
Anticipate disruption, challenge assumptions and make better strategic decisions.
Financial services leaders face accelerating change in technology, customer expectations, business models, and the wider economy. The challenge is not to predict one future, but to understand what may be changing, test assumptions, and make thoughtful decisions while the path ahead remains uncertain.
This one-day experience brings together perspectives on exponential change, strategic foresight, frontier AI, and the future of finance. Senior leaders explore what these developments could mean for their industry, then use a practical Futures Wheel exercise to examine potential consequences and questions for their own organizations.
Who it’s for: Executive committees, banking and insurance leaders, strategy and innovation executives, and senior teams navigating changes in financial services.
One-day executive strategy intensive, in person. Designed for senior leaders in banking and financial services, and adaptable to other industries.
Singularity combines expert-led sessions, peer dialogue, and hands-on application. Examples and the Futures Wheel scenario are tailored to the client’s sector, priorities, and strategic questions.
The learning journey moves leaders from challenging assumptions to exploring possible futures, seeing the next frontier, rethinking finance, and mapping the implications. It is built on four design principles:
Challenge assumptions about the pace of change in financial services.
Explore alternative futures and the signals that matter.
Explore an emerging frontier and its broader implications.
Consider emerging financial models and institutional choices.
Map cascading implications and identify strategic questions to pursue.
Aaron Frank (facilitator)
Challenge familiar assumptions about the pace and impact of technological change. Through examples and executive discussion, consider how exponential developments could affect the financial sector and which questions deserve closer attention.
Andrea Geremicca
Explore how strategic foresight and scenarios can help leaders prepare for multiple plausible futures rather than rely on a single forecast. Consider how to recognize signals, test assumptions, and use alternative futures to inform decisions today.
Hod Lipson
Explore how AI is moving beyond software into physical intelligence and robotics. Concrete examples make the technology tangible, while discussion considers broader implications for autonomy, infrastructure, operations, and customer experiences, even in industries that do not build robots.
Karine Arama
Explore how the boundaries between traditional and decentralized finance may change, and what emerging technologies could mean for financial infrastructure, value creation, competition, and trust. Discuss the strategic questions this raises for established institutions.
Aaron Frank (facilitator)
In a hands-on closing workshop, teams apply the Futures Wheel to a financial-services development relevant to their organization, for example AI agents independently initiating and executing transactions. Map first- and second-order effects, compare opportunities and risks, and identify assumptions and signals worth following.
(presented by facilitator)
Thinking exponentially is core to everything we teach at Singularity, this means that we start with showing how each year the power and/or speed of technology is doubling and/or the cost is dropping by half. Getting into the mindset of thinking exponentially is a fundamental first step for projecting into the future. During this session participants will not just understand the basic definition of exponential growth, but dive into its implications, and shift from a linear way of thinking to an exponential one.
We typically overestimate growth in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term due to the deceptive nature of exponential growth. Because computational technologies (including artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, advanced manufacturing, and more) progress exponentially, its growth and adoption can be surprising. As these technologies continue to democratize, access to use them becomes more widespread and more and more people, companies, and industries will have a role to play in how they’re leveraged.This session will prepare you for thinking about these growth patterns, how they apply to your industry, and what role you can play in their use.
The world around us is changing at an exponential pace. From climate change to water to hunger, global issues are becoming more challenging and growing faster than traditional organizations are able to manage. What does it mean to create impact in this new environment? And how can you, as one of today's most capable leaders, define your own massive transformative purpose?