#419 – January 26, 2026

Strategy in Practice:
Using Foresight, Constraint, and Friction

Hello, fellow strategists! 

We often obsess over flow — streamlining processes, removing barriers, seeking the path of least resistance. But a strategy that is too smooth often slips. More often, progress flounders because of an overlooked constraint, dysfunctional habit, or countervailing trend.

In this edition, we explore the subtle forces that shape outcomes: bottlenecks that throttle momentum, text-first workflows that slow implementation, and our instinct to eliminate friction altogether. Along the way, we look at how leaders use foresight to cope with uncertainty — and why some resistance isn’t a problem to solve, but a source of strength that makes both strategy and life more satisfying. Enjoy!

 

Quick Takes

What’s the One Thing Holding You Back?

Ethan Mollick, writing in his One Useful Thing newsletter, reminds us of a powerful concept drawn from technology history: progress rarely stalls everywhere at once. It stalls at one weak point.

Every frontier —whether technological, organizational, or strategic— is jagged. Our capabilities advance unevenly. Some parts of an organization or project surge ahead, while others lag stubbornly behind. And when one element can’t keep up, it constrains progress like a dog chained to a post: no matter how strong the rest of the system becomes, forward motion is limited.

Mollick also reminds us that systems are only as effective as their tightest bottleneck. Remove that blockage —insert a “stent”, so to speak— and the entire system can suddenly leap forward.

Historian Thomas Hughes had a name for this type of critical constraint: a reverse salient — the single technical, social, or institutional factor holding everything else back. Organizations often misread these moments when they get stuck, assuming progress has reached a plateau, when in fact it is waiting on one stubborn obstacle to give way.

This pattern shows up everywhere, not just in the advance of AI. Any strategy can be sound, demand can be strong, talent can be capable, yet one process, policy, capability, or mindset quietly bogs down the whole enterprise. Until that reverse salient is addressed, effort elsewhere delivers disappointing returns.

The strategic lesson is simple, yet often overlooked: find what’s pushing or holding you back the most. That’s where real opportunity for strategy-making can be found.

 

Text-First Workflows Are Slowing Teams

The State of Visual Communication, a new joint study from The Harris Poll and Canva, examines the cost of outdated, text-first workflows. Based on a global survey of 2,400 professionals, they found that high-quality visuals encode in memory 74% faster and spark significantly higher emotional intensity than text alone.

Their takeaway: “Visual-first communication isn’t just clearer; it’s faster, more memorable, and more impactful.”

Yet, a disconnect remains. While 88% of leaders believe visual fluency is essential, few organizations are truly design-led, and almost as many say poor visual communication causes confusion and delays. The missed opportunity is most visible with Gen Z, a generation that natively ‘speaks’ visual. The data shows:

• 90% say they do their best work visually.
• 89% feel visual skills increase their value as AI reshapes roles.
• 87% see the future of creativity as a human-AI partnership.

Meanwhile, creative teams juggle an average of eight tools just to execute visual work, often cutting corners, using unapproved workarounds, creating risk and eroding efficiency.

Despite billions spent annually on visual content, most organizations could do better.

 

Could Friction Make 2026 Rich and Satisfying?

While we try to remove friction from our work, Kai Brach, a Melbourne-based designer and publisher, recently made a thoughtful case for intentionally reintroducing it into our lives.

In his technology, design and productivity newsletter, Dense Discovery, Kai observes that tech companies have spent years positioning themselves as enablers, with tools designed to amplify our capabilities through ever greater convenience and efficiency.

But perhaps that comes at a cost. As Kai puts it: “We’re learning less, thinking less, tolerating less. We increasingly behave more like toddlers expecting machines to handle life’s unpleasantness.“

As an antidote, he recommends “friction-maxxing” (a term coined by columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton), or deliberately building tolerance for inconvenience, “which is usually not inconvenience at all but just the vagaries of being a person living with other people in spaces that are impossible to completely control – and then reaching even toward enjoyment.”

The key insight, Kai argues, is learning to distinguish between friction and suffering – recognizing that not all discomfort is bad, and that some resistance makes us stronger, sharper, more alive.

Our goal, he suggests, should be a texture-rich life that challenges and rewards us. Not happiness as a frictionless state, but satisfaction earned through the friction itself.

 

8020Info Drill-Down:  Strategic Foresight

From Scanning Signals to Shaping Advantage

Strategic foresight is often described as the disciplined practice of scanning for change, exploring multiple plausible futures, and using those insights to make better choices in the present.

In a recent HBR article, Boston consultants Wendi Backler, Alan Iny, and Moe Turner argue that organizations that excel at foresight outperform others in two key areas: process and mindset.

• On the process side, leaders build systems that help teams look across both real-time and long-term horizons, widening the field of view beyond today’s urgent pressures.
• On the mindset side, foresight leaders move past risk management alone, using data and structured tools not just to avoid surprises, but to find opportunity in uncertainty.

To use Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s metaphor: “Wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them.”

The authors make a useful distinction between two kinds of unknowns. Some aspects of the future are patterned and can be explored using historical data and evidence-based expectations. Others involve breakout unknowns — areas of true uncertainty where prediction breaks down. Here, foresight leaders treat the future as a design challenge rather than a forecasting exercise.

The implication is subtle but important: different types of uncertainty require different foresight methods, and often parallel timelines — one to inform near-term decisions, and another to shape longer-term bets.

Foresight is about building the capacity to engage productively with what can’t yet be known. To go deeper, see What Companies That Excel at Strategic Foresight Do Differently (HBR).

 

For Your Reading List:  On a Strategy Safari

As a process, strategy development can take different forms, and we’re often asked to suggest books on strategy for clients digging deeper. One enduring classic is Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategy, by professors Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel. First published in 1998, this seminal work maps the major schools of strategic thought — from design-oriented and formal planning to analysis and positioning; from visionary entrepreneurship and emergent strategy to negotiation, culture, and collective processes. The authors also explore reactive strategy development, and the challenges of integrating strategy across the organization to bring about real transformation.

 

Closing Thought:  Keep Going

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
— Confucius (551–479 BCE)