Why Collaborative Foresight Matters in a Generative AI World
The companies that thrive will be those that cultivate something machines cannot replicate: the uniquely human capacity to imagine different futures and their place in them.
There's a problem at the heart of the AI revolution. By making all of us more intelligent it makes that intelligence more commoditized and less meaningful. Since November 2022, when ChatGPT introduced generative AI to the masses, we've witnessed an unprecedented expansion of access to analytical capability. Every organization now can research, integrate, and summarize vast amounts of information with speed and increasing accuracy.
Generative AI excels at this type of convergent thinking. In foresight work it can automate trend impact analysis, streamline milestone tracking, and conduct environmental scanning with the thoroughness of a thousand graduate students working around the clock. This is great news for improving the cost and time associated with gathering information about the future.
But when everyone has access to the same analytical engine applied to all the world’s data, everyone arrives at similar conclusions. This is not a bug in the system, it's a feature. Generative AI is designed to return the most plausible response based on patterns in its training data. It is a sophisticated consensus machine. Perhaps we should call it "REgenerative AI”.
The Red Ocean of Algorithmic Strategy
In Kim and Maurborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, red oceans are competitive spaces where companies fight over shrinking profit pools, and blue oceans develop when companies create new market spaces with little or no initial direct competition. Generative AI, for all its power, pushes markets toward red oceans: when all companies in an industry can access the same analytical capabilities, competitive advantage increasingly depends on operational efficiency rather than strategic insight.
Some organizations welcome this level playing field, confident in their ability to out-execute competitors in a world where information asymmetries have largely disappeared. But many companies cannot survive in an environment that resembles the proverbial “knife fight in a phone booth." The hypercompetitive dynamics that emerge when all players have equivalent intelligence create unsustainable pressure on margins, employee engagement, and long-term value creation.
The question is not whether AI will surpass human analytical capabilities. The question becomes how organizations can leverage their most unique asset: the creative, intuitive, pattern-recognizing capacity of human minds working in concert. The same human minds inside your organization that cannot be accessed by your competitors or generative AI. This is the real analytical engine that should power your strategy.
The Neuroscience of Strategic Imagination
Recent research in neuroscience reveals something about human cognition that no algorithm can replicate. When groups of people engage in structured collaborative exercises, like scenario planning, they activate the brain's "default mode network.” This is the same neural circuitry involved in imagination, empathy, and creative problem-solving. This network allows humans to make "remote associations”: connections between seemingly unrelated concepts that can reveal previously invisible possibilities.
This capacity for divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple novel solutions to complex problems, cannot be programmed. It emerges from the intersection of individual experience, collective wisdom, and the serendipitous insight that occurs when diverse minds grapple with uncertainty together.
Understanding this principle means strategy and innovation built on human insight rather than algorithmic analysis. AI's greatest contribution is not in replacing human judgment, but in supporting it by efficiently providing the research foundation and data synthesis that allows human teams to focus on what they do best: imagining futures that don't yet exist and discovering their company’s best fit within them.
Building Organizational Capacity for the Unknown
If humans are really your best competitive advantage, it will be critical to create a nurturing culture and desirable workplace for them. When organizations invest in developing their people's capacity for strategic thinking and scenario planning, they're not just improving decision-making. They are creating more engaging, meaningful work experiences.
There's mounting evidence that people find deep satisfaction in wrestling with complex, open-ended questions. This kind of work engages intrinsic motivation: the drive for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Research consistently shows intrinsic motivation is more powerful than external rewards in sustaining long-term performance.
In an era when organizations are struggling with employee engagement and retention, the companies that create opportunities for their people to contribute to strategic thinking and future planning will have significant advantages in attracting and retaining talent.
The Competitive Advantage of Human Insight
The path forward requires organizations to leverage the unique aspects of both human and artificial intelligence. AI excels at convergent analysis that synthesizes existing information to identify patterns and probabilities. Humans excel at divergent analysis that generates novel possibilities and makes creative leaps that reveal new opportunities. The organizations that learn to combine these capabilities effectively will create sustainable competitive advantages that no amount of technological sophistication can replicate.
This is not a temporary reprieve, or a brief window before AI becomes sophisticated enough to replace human creativity entirely. Even if AI becomes somehow as good or better at divergent thinking as humans, there remains the ubiquitous access problem. If everyone is using AI, they will drive toward the same outcomes. It’s not just that human brains are better, they are also unique. Your competitors do not have access to the human brains in your organization, with their lived experiences, individual genetics and thought processes, and ways of interacting together. Whatever imagined futures humans in your organization develop are inherently proprietary.
The Future of Strategic Innovation
The future, then, is not about choosing between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. It's about designing organizational processes that leverage the unique strengths of both. AI provides the information foundation of comprehensive and tireless analysis of vast data sets. Humans provide the imaginative superstructure of creative leaps, intuitive insights, and collaborative wisdom that transform information into understanding and understanding into strategic advantage.
The companies that master this integration will not only survive the AI revolution but be able to use it as a foundation to create forms of competitive advantage that are more durable, more humane, and more aligned with the fundamental purpose of organizations and their people.
The Wavepoint Model: Designing for Differentiation
This is the philosophy that has always driven the work at Wavepoint. Our model has centered on designing collaborative experiences that produce "proprietary views of the future"—strategic insights that cannot be replicated by competitors because they emerge from the unique intersection of your organization's people, culture, and context.
In the pre-AI era, this required substantial investment in research and analysis. Our teams would spend months producing trend reports, environmental scans, and multimedia briefings to support strategic conversations. Now, artificial intelligence has transformed this equation dramatically. What once required 50% of our staff time can now be automated. Trend Impact Analysis, milestone tracking, and environmental scanning activities can now be performed by AI systems with greater speed and consistency than human researchers. Human experts can then review and augment the base research and analysis with their expertise in a fraction of the time they used to spend.
This transformation has allowed us to focus our energy—and our clients' investment—on the irreplaceable core of strategic foresight: designing and facilitating the collaborative process of human minds working together to develop unique perspectives on emerging possibilities. Your best people, equipped with the best information, engaged in systematic foresight processes that yield proprietary insights and actionable roadmaps for innovation, strategy, and growth.