The discomfort stems from the way the word conflates a personal habit with a convenient label.
The Trait vs. The Label
The first concept is a trait: a habit of where your attention goes. At its core, horizon scanning is simply noticing shifts before a shared vocabulary exists for them. Leadership scholars put the mechanism plainly: no single person can make sense of everything shifting around an organisation at once. Consequently, some people end up specialising in it almost by accident, while everyone else focuses on the work directly in front of them. It comes down to an allocation of attention. Some of us spend a disproportionate share of our cognitive budget several years out, and correspondingly less on where we are standing today. It is a disposition that shows up early and stays.
The second concept is the label itself, which lives in other people’s mouths. There is a version of the word that compliments you, and a version that quietly files you somewhere safer to ignore—and both arrive in the same warm tone.
The Early Warner
Alexandra Davoli has a sharper vocabulary for this trait. This disposition is closest to what she calls the canary: the one who senses trouble before anyone else. Organisations tend to lose three other kinds of people alongside them:
- The thorn in the fur: who asks the avoided questions.
- The court jester: who says the unsayable wrapped in a joke.
- The white raven: who simply thinks differently.
Being called visionary can be genuine recognition. But it can also be the institution’s way of sorting you into one of these roles without ever using the word. The result amounts to the same thing: noted, tolerated, and not quite acted upon.
The vision gets praised at the away-day and quietly parked once the agenda returns to what is on fire this week. Being called visionary and being taken seriously in the meeting that actually allocates money are two different experiences; I’ve had both, and they don’t always arrive together.
The Costs of Looking Ahead
There is a colder read of the label, too. Foresight looks generous from afar, but from the operational floor, it can look like absence. Colleagues fighting this month’s fire don’t always feel grateful toward someone describing next year’s smoke. Some days, the word carries a faint demotion inside the compliment—tolerated for not matching the profile rather than valued for it.
As Davoli notes, the early warner speaks up once, then goes quiet. That quiet gets mistaken for things being fine. Because silence isn’t visible, nobody notices the retreat until a mistake arrives that someone had clearly seen coming. Institutional silence is the external cost of this habit, but there is a second, internal cost: the habit of always looking further out can become a private momentum that mistakes forward for better.
The Internal Trap
The transitions scholar Derk Loorbach captures this beautifully with one phrase:
Onthaasten, ontregelen en onttoveren — decelerate, disrupt the routine, disenchant.
Loorbach is writing about the academic rat race and institutional change, but the three moves map uncomfortably well onto the horizon-scanning habit itself.
Decelerating is the plainest of the three. It requires stepping back from the immediate noise. When caught up in the operational rush, you can only see the fire directly in front of you. The broader environment—where the heat originates, how the drafts are shifting—is only visible if you stop reacting long enough to look. Scanning ahead, left to its own pace, stays in the rush. It converts a signal into a forecast before it has had the chance to become knowledge. Decelerating is less a talent than a deliberate decision to stop moving.
Disrupting the routine is harder, because the routine belongs to me. The moment a pattern registers, my reflex is to package it—the next slide, the next remark—before it has been checked against anything. Interrupting that reflex means holding an unpolished observation longer than feels comfortable, resisting the urge to turn it into immediate content. It is tempting to believe that because the pile of immediate demands keeps growing, meeting them instantly is what helps. But the fast answer is almost always a superficial one—an oppervlakkige fix, like another training session that produces a metric by Friday. The slow answer means looking for origins and underlying causes. It requires designing solutions that build indirectly, whose true value will only show itself clearly in a year’s time. Building a culture that lets people feel capable on their own terms is harder to schedule and harder to measure by the end of the quarter. I know which of the two I would defend in a budget meeting, and I know which one usually loses the argument.
Disenchanting is the move I find hardest to admit I need. The label visionary borrows its force from the idea that seeing ahead is a kind of gift. Treating it as an ordinary craft rather than a special sight is what keeps it honest. A lookout who raises the alarm at every shadow is useless; the value lies in judgement, in knowing when the landscape has actually changed. Speed alone cannot provide this, and no amount of mystique can substitute for it.
Taken together, these three moves ask for less certainty about what I am seeing, and more patience regarding when to say it.
The Burden of Vigilance
Yet, what I keep coming back to is the sheer loneliness of the practice. Looking further out means carrying observations that lack a shared language, and translating them into something usable for colleagues focused elsewhere. Some weeks it lands. Some weeks, it just sounds like someone talking about next year while everyone else is trying to survive Thursday.
An early warner is often observing a landscape nobody else is watching closely.
There is a sharper truth underneath this that I have been resisting. The traditional role of the lookout is built for exactly one thing: noticing what’s wrong before it harms the collective. Nobody posts a sentry to notice what’s going right. As Carissa VĂ©liz points out in her recent writing on prediction, our appetite for vigilance quietly guarantees that any extrapolated future will look frightening. Most of what I notice early turns out to be a problem rather than a possibility.
If the trap is constant, fearful prediction, the antidote might be what Harry Starren calls flaneren, and Mathieu Weggeman terms banjeren: wandering with no agenda, listening rather than looking for anything specific. A flâneur never assumes they already know everything. What looks like idleness from the outside—not visibly chasing the next goal—might be exactly the point. Wandering clears enough space to notice what actually matters, without hunting for the next threat.
The Work of Noticing
“Visionary” only gets used because looking up and beyond is rare enough to be worth naming. An organisation that relies on a single lookout has already decided, without quite meaning to, that everyone else’s job is to keep their eyes on the floor. Davoli’s answer is building psychological safety as a baseline, so that noticing early stops being a role a handful of people get stuck with, and starts being a habit everyone is allowed to practise out loud.
In the end, the label matters less than what we do with the habit itself. The goal is not to be admired for seeing a distant future, but to be trusted enough to help the organisation navigate toward it. A trusted colleague is listened to while there is still time to change course; an admired visionary is merely told “you were right” after the damage is already done.
Stripped of its mystique, horizon scanning isn’t a solitary burden of prediction. It is the vital, persistent practice of keeping the broader landscape in view. It requires looking deeply inside as well as from afar, because, as Weggeman warns, kijk naar buiten, anders zie je niets—look outside, otherwise you see nothing. An institution entirely consumed by the work directly in front of it is one that has surrendered its ability to choose its own direction. Crucially, this outward gaze must be shared, so that noticing the future becomes a collective capability rather than an individual eccentricity.
The future will always have its fires. But anticipating them should never be an isolated burden. Real vision is the shared discipline of keeping the horizon in view—ensuring that what we see afar actually changes the way we choose to move forward.
References & Further Reading
Davoli, A. (2026, June 27). De gele kanarie, de luis in de pels, de hofnar en de witte raaf [LinkedIn post]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/de-gele-kanarie-luis-pels-hofnar-en-witte-raaf-alexandra-davoli-4s42e/
Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009, July–August). Leadership in a (permanent) crisis. Harvard Business Review.
Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.
Loorbach, D. (2026). Onthaasten, ontregelen en onttoveren: Naar een transformatieve academie. TH&MA Hoger Onderwijs, 2026(2). https://www.themahogeronderwijs.org/110-4215_h1-Onthaasten-ontregelen-en-onttoveren-h1
Starren, H. (2026, June 29). Flaneren [LinkedIn post, including reply from Mathieu Weggeman]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/harrystarren_the-flaneur-side-notes-on-the-human-comedy-share-7477206221490630656-y_Qd/
The New Yorker. (2026, May 8). Do we think too much about the future? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/do-we-think-too-much-about-the-future