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Leading When You Can't Know the Future
Leaders who wait for certainty decide too late. How your leaders steer without knowing what comes next.
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Leaders are paid to decide, yet nobody can tell them what the future will look like. Those who wait for certainty decide too late. Those who bet on a single forecast decide wrongly.
This keynote brings together two lines of Joachim's work: the lessons from Why Innovation Fails on why organisations get stuck, and the scenario planning he teaches at Ghent University.
Participants gain a way of thinking to steer without knowing: laying several futures side by side, recognising early signals and making decisions that stand firm in every scenario.
Recognition
Why Data Wins methodologies are used in more than 10,000 organisations
Why Innovation Fails ranked among the top five Dutch-language management books of 2023
First LannooCampus book with a built-in AI assistant (VRT NWS, December 2024)
Member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council
Professor of Scenario Planning and Future Health at Ghent University
Joachim De Vos (MSc in Engineering, MBA) is an author, professor at Ghent University and international keynote speaker. He is known as the driving force behind Living Tomorrow/House of the Future and TomorrowLab for more than 25 years, before stepping down from his operational role at the end of 2025. Today, he is the CEO and founder of FuturuZ.
His book Why Innovation Fails (LannooCampus, 2022) ranked among the top five Dutch-language management books of 2023. Together with Steven Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera, he revisits the Kodak story from an insider’s perspective. It was the first LannooCampus book with a built-in AI assistant.
In 2026, he published Why Data Wins: Transform Your Organisation into a Data-Driven Powerhouse in 7 Key Steps. Written for managers rather than technical specialists, the book covers everything from data literacy and governance to AI, with case studies from organisations including BDO, Craftzing and BARC. More than 300 leaders attended its launch at KBC’s headquarters in Brussels, with Herman Van Rompuy (President Emeritus of the European Council), KBC CEO Johan Thijs, BDO CEO Peter Van Laer and Murli Buluswar (Head of Decision Science, Optum – UnitedHealth) on stage.
At Ghent University, he is Professor of Scenario Planning and Future Health and has been teaching scenario planning for more than ten years. He trained in scenario planning at Oxford, holds an engineering degree in electronics and data communications, and earned an MBA at FBS-KU Leuven and Kellogg. He serves on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council.
Every keynote draws on a book, a methodology or his own research and is tailored to the people in the room. To support this, he has developed his own toolkit, including the 6 Levels of Innovation™ model, the Data-Golf Scan™, the Black Box Canvas™ and the ImQ Test™. He combines these with established methods such as scenario planning and the Three Horizons model. His audiences leave with more than inspiration: they leave with tools to make decisions.
Author and Ghent University professor helping leaders understand transformation failures and navigate an uncertain future.
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