fivesights

Our approach

One position always hides something.

At Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, 15 stones sit in raked gravel. From any one spot on the viewing veranda you can see at most 14. A team deciding from one position is in the same place, so our method takes it through five, in order, with its values underneath.

  • ForesightWhat might be coming?
  • InsightWhat might others miss?
  • SightWhat is actually happening?
  • HindsightWhat has already happened?
  • OversightWhat are we responsible for?
  • ValuesBeneath all five, as the stone.

Where the mark comes from

A bird cut into the five positions.

"We are not making you into something you're not. We are shaping your values."

Drawn by Ibnur Rashad after the 2026 Asia Pacific Futures Network gathering in Bangkok, as a foresight mark grounded in Singapore.

  1. A black swan.

    A rare, high-impact event that looks predictable only afterwards, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes it in The Black Swan (2007). We do not claim to predict one. We train teams to be ready when one lands.

  2. Cut into pieces.

    Each piece is one sight. Stand in one position and you see one piece. The full view needs all of them.

  3. The red point is Foresight.

    It points forward, and it is the red dot of Singapore, where the practice and its method were made.

  4. The pieces fold into a stone.

    The total area does not change. The stone is the organisation's values: the material every sight is cut from.

01 · The beak

Foresight

What might be coming?

Foresight is not prediction. Prediction claims certainty; Foresight claims readiness. What conditions are already in place? What forces are already moving? What might emerge from the combinations we can already see?

Foresight is strongest when it comes out of Insight, Sight and Hindsight together. Without them it is speculation.

Questions it asks

  • What changes are already underway?
  • What could knock us off the path we are on?
  • What are we assuming is stable that might not be?

Methods that sit here

  • Scenario planning (Shell, Peter Schwartz)
  • Three Horizons (Sharpe, International Futures Forum)
  • Futures wheel
  • STEEP and PESTLE trend scanning
  • Backcasting from a target future
  • Causal Layered Analysis (Inayatullah)
  • Weak signals and wildcards scanning
02 · The head

Insight

What might others miss?

Insight is interpretation: the meaning-making position. Where do the patterns point? What do they show about how this system works underneath the surface?

Insight without Hindsight is guesswork. Insight without Sight is theory with no ground under it.

Questions it asks

  • What behaviour are we observing, and what would explain it?
  • What constraint is actually active here?
  • What would someone need to believe for this to make sense?

Methods that sit here

  • Jobs to be done (Christensen)
  • Systems thinking and leverage points (Donella Meadows); the iceberg model
  • First-principles reasoning
  • Theory of Constraints (Goldratt)
  • Mental models (Senge); the ladder of inference (Argyris)
  • Ethnographic and design research
03 · The neck

Sight

What is actually happening?

Sight is awareness of the present: what is in front of you now, stripped of narrative. It is the hardest position, because you have to describe what you see without filtering it through what you expected, wanted or feared to find.

Sight is the ground truth the other positions lean on, as the other pieces lean on the neck. Hindsight without it becomes nostalgia. Foresight without it becomes fantasy.

Questions it asks

  • What are we observing, and what are we assuming?
  • What are people doing, not what do they say they are doing?
  • Where is the gap between the stated process and the lived one?

Methods that sit here

  • Gemba walks (Toyota, Lean)
  • OODA loop, the Observe step
  • Endsley's three levels of situational awareness
  • Sensemaking (Karl Weick)
  • Cynefin probe, sense, respond (Snowden)
  • Operational dashboards and leading-indicator KPIs
04 · The lower wing

Hindsight

What has already happened?

Hindsight is pattern recognition from experience. It is neither nostalgia nor blame: it is the disciplined reading of your own past, your industry's past and the wider world's.

Hindsight teaches Foresight. You cannot anticipate what you have not learned to recognise. Many teams confuse it with Insight: Hindsight is what happened and the patterns in it, Insight is what those patterns mean.

Questions it asks

  • Where have we seen this condition before?
  • What did we do last time, and what happened as a result?
  • What early signals did we miss, and how would we see them now?

Methods that sit here

  • After Action Reviews (US Army)
  • Agile retrospectives and blameless post-mortems
  • Five whys and Ishikawa cause analysis
  • Double-loop learning (Argyris and Schön)
  • Lessons-learned registers and decision journals
05 · The upper wing

Oversight

What are we responsible for?

Oversight is the view from the position of responsibility: governance, accountability and stewardship of the whole system. What are the bounds of what you answer for? What needs protecting?

Most teams skip it, treating it as compliance rather than strategy. Skip it and you build plans that break people, or dependencies you cannot sustain. Oversight keeps you honest about who pays for what you decided.

Questions it asks

  • Who depends on this system working?
  • Where are we responsible but not in control?
  • What costs are we leaving to someone else?

Methods that sit here

  • Three Lines model (Institute of Internal Auditors)
  • RACI and DACI accountability mapping
  • Stakeholder salience model (Mitchell, Agle and Wood)
  • Balanced Scorecard, used as a governance lens
  • COSO ERM, fiduciary duty mapping and ESG materiality
The stone, beneath all five

Values

Values are the stone.

Values are what you fund and what you protect when the choice gets hard. What you give up under pressure shows them as clearly as what you defend.

Two teams can run the same five positions well and reach different conclusions, because their values differ. No method is value-neutral, ours included. We make your values visible so they are part of the conversation instead of hidden underneath the decision.

"We are not making you into something you're not. We are shaping your values."

Methods that sit here

  • Schwartz theory of basic human values
  • Barrett Cultural Values Assessment
  • Stated-versus-revealed values audit
  • Spiral Dynamics, as a values-development lens

Where a method belongs

  • Each position answers a different kind of question, so a method sits under the position whose question it answers. A few, like Cynefin and the Balanced Scorecard, span two. That is where naming the position you are in matters most.

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