The Cicero 90
Article Index

How Two Practitioners Built an Intellectual Foundation

We often talk about de-risking our product strategy or product roadmap, but what about de-risking and preparing for our futures? It is easy to get lost in the daily grind, focusing solely on the next three to six months while reacting to the latest curveball that disrupts our best-laid plans.

Charles Plath and I had spent years working at the intersection of design thinking and strategic foresight, bringing decades of UX research, CX strategy, and human-centered design to the conversation. We had the practitioner instincts. What we lacked was the scholarly depth to anchor what we were building in the field's forty-year intellectual tradition.

The Cicero Challenge fixed that. Ninety peer-reviewed articles in ninety days, each read, reflected upon, and publicly posted to LinkedIn and Instagram. We read the same article every day. Every reflection was different. The daily discipline forced synthesis, not just comprehension. Each article connected to the ones before it, building an increasingly dense map of the field's real structure.

The result was not a bibliography. It was a genuine intellectual foundation from which to synthesize strategic foresight and futures thinking with strategy and human-centered design. The eight intellectual threads that structure this index emerged organically from the reading itself. The convergence points became the basis for the ForesightOps methodology. The evidence base became the scholarly grounding for three working papers.

Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta, §12, 62 BC. Trans. N.H. Watts, Loeb Classical Library Vol. 11, 1923.

Our deepest thanks to the authors of every article, paper, and book in this index, and to the broader community of foresight, strategic foresight, and strategy practitioners who have contributed to this field of inquiry. The Cicero 90 exists because the field exists. The scholarship represented here is the product of decades of intellectual labor by researchers and practitioners who built the foundations we now stand on.