From Sensing to Transforming: A Dynamic Capability Perspective on Strategic Foresight and Visionary Leadership

In an era defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), traditional linear strategic planning and retrospective forecasting are fundamentally insufficient for sustained organisational resilience. This literature review synthesises post-2015 peer-reviewed scholarly research to examine how strategic foresight serves as a crucial anticipatory discipline and an epistemological shift in strategic management. Operating on the theoretical premise that the future is a complex landscape of multiple plausible outcomes rather than a singular predetermined outcome destination, strategic foresight provides the conceptual foundation required to navigate environmental disruptions, anticipate weak signals, and proactively shape market trajectories. The paper grounds strategic foresight within the Dynamic Capability View (DCV), demonstrating how foresight acts as the primary "sensing" capability that activates strategic agility ("seizing") and strategic flexibility ("transforming") to build long-term resilience. It synthesises the eight core features of strategic foresight, including prioritising conjectures over objective knowledge, institutionalising the art of questioning, prospective anthropology, and democratising strategic engagement alongside the analytical, speculative, and systemic application lenses. To effectively translate foresight into action, leadership must adopt an anticipatory posture anchored in five linked literacies: awareness, authenticity, audacity, adaptability, and action. Furthermore, leaders must deploy transformational and charismatic behaviours—specifically, idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualised consideration—to convert abstract scenario analysis into an emotionally resonant, shared organisational purpose. Methodologically, the review analyses how corporate foresight maturity—executed through iterative perceiving, prospecting, and probing processes yields significant empirical performance benefits, including superior firm profitability and market capitalisation growth. It contrasts traditional quantitative planning tools with modern hybrid foresight processes that integrate speculative design, science fiction, and agile management mechanisms to bridge the imagination gap and provoke visceral commitment. To chart an executable trajectory, visionary leaders deploy backcasting and future-retrospective thinking, reframing current operational hurdles into logical milestones on a reverse-engineered strategic roadmap. At the rhetorical level, the paper explores narrative foresight, utilising Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) and image-based rhetoric to deconstruct restrictive cultural myths and recast empirical data within empowering organisational metaphors. This narrative alignment serves as a psychological engine that fosters employee psychological empowerment across four key dimensions: meaning, competence, self-determination, and influence. Subordinate empowerment acts as a vital mediator, converting executive strategic foresight into bottom-up innovative performance and organisational agility. Finally, the review evaluates real-world applications across Industry 4.0 digital leadership, crisis management in high-stakes industries, and public sector governance. Synthesising these perspectives, the paper demonstrates that strategic foresight is a foundational dialogic capability enabling leaders and workforces to collaboratively architect, inspire, and navigate the future organisation.