About Project Sunstone

Welcome to Project Sunstone.

My focus here is foresight and strategy. It’s your place if:

You’re stressed by future uncertainty. You’ve pushed decisions down the road waiting for clarity that doesn’t come.

You’ve been blindsided by disruption. You’re surprised by change and frustrated about not seeing it coming when the signs were there.

You’re fighting fires instead of preventing them. You’re in a culture where reactive feels normal, but it’s exhausting and unsustainable.

You’re stagnating from short-term thinking. You’re focused on immediate tasks and issues that aren’t strategically positioning you for the future.

You find it difficult to get people thinking about possibilities beyond the status quo. You’re following an outdated script. You’re on an old path (or someone else’s path) rather than blazing your own.

You’re disappointed with what currently serves as foresight and strategy. Whatever you’ve done hasn’t been effective. Documents sit on the shelf waiting for the next annual update that probably won’t be any better.

You appreciate the potential of foresight and strategy, but need help practicing and advocating it. You need technical help and inspiration to move forward in a more innovative and meaningful way.

If that’s you, I’m happy you’re here. Please join in the conversation and let’s tackle this together.

Thirty years ago I worked in a very large organization. There were strategies, plans, and policies for everything. Detailed processes and plenty of oversight. Yet there were a lot of problems.

Everything followed a checklist. We filled squares without thinking. Surprises were common. Change was resisted. Projects overran budget and schedule, and often underperformed.

I wanted to know why. What I was taught about strategy didn’t seem right. I hadn’t heard of foresight, but I knew systems and applied that to look for patterns and connections.

Over time I experimented, learned, and developed an approach, which I incorporated into my work. I’ve used it successful on many projects, across companies large and small. In these pages I share what I’ve learned (and am still learning) and hope it will get you thinking about how to apply foresight and strategy in your life and work.

Where did I get the name Project Sunstone? Medieval Vikings used the polarizing properties of the transparent sunstone (or Icelandic Spar) to determine a direction towards the sun when it wasn’t visible due to fog or overcast skies; an essential need for maritime navigation in their often-cloudy region.

The sunstone pierced through the fog to provide direction when that direction wasn’t otherwise clear. This is what we hope to accomplish through foresight; a direction into the future that cuts through the fog and uncertainty.

Thanks for being here.