The future rarely unfolds exactly as expected. For organizations responsible for public health, critical services, and community safety, the ability to anticipate change can make a meaningful difference in how effectively they respond to emerging challenges. Yet in a world shaped by climate disruption, evolving security risks and complex global shifts, preparing for what comes next requires more than reacting to immediate pressures. It requires a different approach to decision-making.
For Donna Dupont, founder of Purple Compass, this is where strategic foresight becomes essential. Her work focuses on helping organizations develop the mindset, capabilities, and practical tools needed to navigate the known complex landscape, anticipate and look beyond the immediate horizon at emerging issues, risks, and potential for cascading failures and disruption, and engage in strategic conversations to explore these possible futures, uncovering new insights to assist with decisions that strengthen and build their long-term resilience.
Drawing on a career spanning approximately 30 years across healthcare practice, government public policy, advisory work and health emergency management, Dupont brings a multidisciplinary perspective to the challenges organizations face today. Her work now brings together strategic foresight, design strategy, healthcare, climate change, civil security and emergency preparedness, with the goal of helping leaders move from uncertainty towards clarity and more proactive, deliberate and informed action.
Many organizations operate under constant pressure to address immediate demands. Leaders must manage existing services, respond to emerging risks and make decisions with limited time and incomplete information. While this reactive approach may be necessary in the moment, it can leave organizations less prepared for changes that develop gradually or emerge from several interconnected challenges that amplify and compound over time, leading to a polycrisis situation that simultaneously shocks and overload systems.
Strategic foresight offers a way to broaden that perspective. Rather than attempting to predict one definitive future, it encourages organizations to consider multiple plausible and possible scenarios, identify emerging signals of change, question the assumptions and stress-test their underlying current strategies.
This process can help leaders recognize vulnerabilities before they become urgent problems, explore alternative courses of action, and develop strategies that remain robust across different possible futures.
For Dupont, building this anticipatory mindset is particularly important during periods of significant disruption. Future-readiness is not simply about having a plan in place. It is about creating the organizational capacity to reassess that plan as the broader environment and circumstances change.
That distinction matters in sectors such as healthcare and emergency management, where decisions made today can influence the ability to protect people and maintain essential services tomorrow.
Dupont’s professional background provides a foundation for examining challenges that rarely fit neatly within a single discipline. Healthcare systems, climate risks and civil security are increasingly interconnected, requiring organizations to consider how developments in one area may affect others.
Climate change, for example, can create pressures that extend well beyond the environment. Extreme weather and other climate-related hazards can affect healthcare infrastructure, disrupt supply chains, increase demands on health services and place additional strain on emergency response systems. Preparing for these challenges requires coordination across teams and institutions that may traditionally approach risk from different perspectives.
Dupont’s work at Purple Compass focuses on bringing these perspectives together. By combining knowledge from different fields with the lived experiences of the people involved, organizations can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges ahead and explore solutions that account for a wider range of needs.
This approach also recognizes that resilience is not achieved through technical planning alone. It depends on how people understand a challenge, how they collaborate, and whether they have the confidence and flexibility to act when circumstances change.
Bringing different forms of expertise into the same conversation can reveal gaps in existing strategies, challenge established assumptions and open up possibilities that might otherwise remain overlooked.
Through Purple Compass, Dupont hosts the Futures Intelligence Lab, which supports work at the intersection of strategic foresight, design and complex organizational challenges.
The emphasis is on making future-oriented thinking relevant to real decisions. Exploring possible futures is only useful when the insights generated can inform priorities, guide planning, and help organizations determine what they need to do differently in the present.
For leaders, this means asking questions that extend beyond immediate operational concerns. What developments could fundamentally change the environment in which an organization operates? Which existing assumptions may no longer hold true? What capabilities will be needed if current challenges intensify or new ones emerge?
These questions can help organizations identify where they may need to build capacity, strengthen partnerships, or reconsider how resources are allocated.
Dupont is also developing a Climate Futures program, initially focused on healthcare organizations. The initiative reflects the need to bring climate considerations more directly into conversations about healthcare planning, organizational resilience and emergency preparedness.
As part of this work, she is developing a Climate Resilience Assessment Tool intended as a quick diagnostic to help organizations identify areas that may require further attention. The tool is designed to support a more structured consideration of climate resilience, complementing the broader strategic work involved in preparing for an uncertain future.
By connecting foresight with practical assessment, the aim is to help organizations move from recognizing emerging risks to considering how those risks can impact their operations and influence their decisions for the future.
A defining feature of Dupont’s approach is her emphasis on collaboration across disciplines and experiences. Complex global challenges seldom have solutions that can be developed from one professional viewpoint alone. They require people to understand how their knowledge connects with that of others and how different experiences can contribute to a more complete picture.
This collaborative approach is particularly relevant when organizations are planning for situations that have no straightforward precedent. Established processes may provide a useful starting point, but they may not be sufficient when conditions change significantly or several risks converge.
Creating space for diverse perspectives can help teams learn, challenge assumptions, and tap into the collective intelligence to identify responses that are both more adaptable with future pathways more closely aligned with the people they serve.
It can also strengthen a sense of agency. While organizations cannot control every external development, they can make deliberate choices about how they prepare, which relationships they build and what capabilities they develop.
For Dupont, helping people recognize that capacity to shape the future is central to the work of future-readiness and building future resilience.
Dupont’s transition from healthcare practitioner, public policy advisor and healthsystem emergency manager to founder and foresight strategist reflects a career spent working across different dimensions of complex systems. Today, Purple Compass brings those perspectives together to help organizations consider not only the challenges immediately in front of them, but also the changes that could reshape their responsibilities in the years ahead.
As healthcare organizations and other critical institutions confront increasing uncertainty, the question is no longer simply how to respond when disruption occurs. It is how to build the capacity to anticipate change, understand its implications, and make decisions that remain relevant as circumstances evolve.
Strategic foresight cannot eliminate uncertainty, nor can it guarantee that every emerging challenge will be anticipated. Its value lies in helping organizations become more thoughtful and adaptable in the face of it.
Through Purple Compass, Dupont is working to make that capability more accessible to organizations navigating the intersection of healthcare, climate change, and security. By combining multidisciplinary knowledge, collaborative thinking and practical tools, her work seeks to help leaders prepare more deliberately for what lies ahead.
Ultimately, future-readiness is not about knowing exactly what tomorrow will bring. It is about developing the insight, resilience and agency to respond when it arrives.
