SBP Interview - Foresight Doesn’t Get a Free Pass, with Jo Lepore.
EP 247 · Oct 27, 2026 · 55 min · Jo Lepore
0:00 / 55:10
The short version
Marketing science says buyer behaviour barely moves. Futurists sell the opposite: change, disruption, the thing nobody saw coming. Can both be true? Marc and Vassilis brought in someone who can referee it.
Jo Lepore built the foresight function inside Mars Wrigley and then McDonald’s, co-founded a network for people doing that work at some of the world’s biggest companies, and now leads foresight at Dig Insights. She also hosts the podcast Looking Outside. Her starting point is refreshingly blunt: foresight doesn’t get a free pass on proving its value, and neither does marketing.
In this one:
→ Foresight isn’t futurism. It’s not a crystal ball or a dart at the board. It’s throwing the dart toward where you want to go, then rehearsing multiple paths to get there. As Jo puts it, rehearse for every future rather than bank one.
→ “Isn’t this just market research with a longer horizon?” No. You can’t ask a future consumer anything, they don’t exist. Insights are past-based facts; foresight is weak signals and carefully weighed assumptions.
→ Nobody gets rewarded for preventing a fire. How foresight earns buy-in by helping put out the fire that’s already spreading, with the GLP-1 work Jo’s team ran at McDonald’s six months early as the proof.
→ The pandemic test. Jo’s Mars work found the big shifts were accelerated, not caused, by COVID, and those were the ones they were already tracking.
→ The bridge to marketing. Backcasting and innovation roadmaps (the three-horizons model), plus why foresight should sit as a capability across the business, not trapped in one team.
Plus three things any marketer can do Monday morning, and a Big Mac No Meat dare that becomes a real-world experiment.
Enjoy the show!
Our Guest: Jo Lepore
Global Foresight Strategist, Dig Insights | Host, Looking Outside
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannalepore/
Chapters
00:00 Cold open: foresight should prove its value too
01:40 Meet Jo Lepore, and “double lucky”
02:30 What foresight is, and why it isn’t futurism
04:50 Is this just market research with a longer horizon?
09:00 Vitamin vs painkiller: earning buy-in
11:50 The GLP-1 call at McDonald’s, six months early
12:58 WestJet, COVID, and planning in crisis mode
15:30 The Mars pandemic work: accelerated, not caused
18:00 Horizon scanning: bringing the pockets together
19:30 Canada, OCAD, and where foresight lives today
20:30 Beyond chicken little: anticipatory leadership and antifragility
25:00 Does a business actually need a foresight function?
28:00 The bridge to marketing: backcasting and three horizons
34:00 “Foresight doesn’t get a free pass”
37:00 Creative vs effectiveness: let the teams battle it out
41:00 Cultural foresight, and layering in the whole business
45:30 Victim of your own success, and getting typecast
47:00 Building McDonald’s generative AI Center of Excellence
48:56 Three things to do Monday morning
53:40 Big Mac No Meat: the experiment
54:30 Thanks and close
Hosts
Marc Binkley
Quatical - https://quatical.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbinkley/
Vassilis Douros
Personal Website: https://vassilisdouros.com
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vassilisdouros/
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Chapters
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Transcript
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SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Baba podcast.
SPEAKER_05: Fundamentally, I believe that of any function in an organization that no matter what team you're in, you're constantly thinking about your KPIs. You want to add value to the people that you're working with. You want to up aid the business growth and its ambitions. And Foresight should be doing that too. But it for whatever reason it hasn't had like a stringent, it hasn't held itself up towards the same stringent responsibilities.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast, a place for business leaders to get the best and most credible information on marketing, strategy, and innovation. Your hosts, Mark Binkley and Vasili Stouros, share their experiences as they gather insights from the world's leading experts. Now, on with the show.