My name is Barbara
I teach Corporate Foresight to (aspiring) executives to help them find opportunities for growth and relevance.
With five much older siblings, it was debate or perish ;)
And the debate stuck: employers and friends have told me to go into politics or to become a lawyer. But I got into Corporate Foresight (debating plausible futures) and earned my Ph.D. on the side.
It led to inspiring collaboration with the following clients:
Publications
Besides debating futures with clients, the Ph.D. research required debating with peers within the discipline of Futures Studies. Without their fabulous feedback, I would not have been able to develop these papers:
Compensating for perceptual filters in weak signal assessments
Futures, 2019
About the measures that Captains of Industry take to avoid tunnel vision, blind spots, and other problems with perceiving future disruption.
Straws That Tell the Wind: Top-Manager Perception of Distant Signals of the Future
Dissertation TU Delft Repository, 2020
About the role of different expertise types in seeing what's next.
Unifying weak signals definitions to improve construct understanding
Futures, 2021
How to make sure that the conceptualization of the weak signal construct validates earlier studies.
What Makes Me Happy:
Paying it Forward
Passing on my learnings of the past 20+ years to new generations of managers, who, in turn, teach their teams. I'm so passionate about it that I devote 40% of my time to executive education! And that the other 40% for projects with clients is also shaped as management development programs. The remaining 20% is for Foresight research.
Think of me as the Yoda of Foresight (minus the green skin) 😉
And when I'm not working
I am known to sing 17th and 18th-century opera in the oldest polder of the Netherlands, a UNESCO World heritage site. I just love the contradiction with foresight :)
