In Part 1, we introduced the concept of dual accuracy — balancing numerical precision with navigational foresight. The question now becomes practical: how can FP&A teams apply this in real-world planning, decision-making, and business partnering?

The second part focuses on the implementation and possible integration of dual accuracy within the organisation. It argues that the business partner should consider and engage with both measures and provides practical advice on how to do so.

Beyond Budgeting: Liberation Without Loss of Direction

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” 

Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate

No discussion of planning accuracy is complete without addressing the Beyond Budgeting movement. The movement argues persuasively that the traditional annual budget — with its fixed targets, rigid allocations, and incentive-linked performance contracts — is fundamentally unfit for a volatile world. Bjarte Bogsnes recently called it created in the absence of trust.[2]

Beyond Budgeting’s twelve principles, spanning leadership and management processes, advocate for relative targets, rolling forecasts, dynamic resource allocation, and decentralised decision-making. The movement has inspired organisations from Statoil (now Equinor) to Handelsbanken to abandon the annual budget ritual entirely.

The contribution to the accuracy debate is significant. Beyond Budgeting correctly identifies that false accuracy, the illusion of control created by detailed annual budgets negotiated months in advance, is worse than honest uncertainty. A precise but obsolete budget number is not accurate; it is a theatre of past ambitions. Prognoses and plans must be realistic, not merely ambitious, to achieve forecast integrity.

Yet Beyond Budgeting and Strategic Foresight serve different aspects of the accuracy imperative. Beyond Budgeting liberates the process from the rigidity that prevents accuracy. Strategic Foresight enriches the content by expanding the range of futures that accuracy must serve. One removes the cage; the other expands the horizon.

Positioning the Accuracy Contributions

Figure 2: Comparative Accuracy Contributions

FP&A as Business Partner: The Couturier of Confidence

“Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.” 

Coco Chanel, French fashion designer and founder of the House of Chanel

The FP&A Business Partner is a couturier of confidence — someone who provides the raw material of data, assumptions, and strategic intent to tailor a garment that fits the organisation’s unique body. Just as haute couture demands both precision (measurement) and vision (design), the FP&A Business Partner should demand both forecast accuracy and foresight accuracy.

The FP&A Trends community has long advocated for this elevated role. The journey from scorekeeper to business partner to strategic advisor mirrors the maturity arc from reactive to predictive to adaptive. To be clear, this is more than just fashion. It’s about looking good while choosing the right things to wear, given the current circumstances. That means a precisely tailored system to act with confidence should discuss and decide on the requirements to get things done tomorrow. This precision is numerical in hindsight. In foresight, it is systemic: the right process, the right horizon, the right conversation at the right time.

When FP&A operates as a true Business Partner, it holds space for both types of accuracy simultaneously. In the near term, it delivers the forecast rigour that operational decisions demand. In the medium term, it facilitates scenario discussions to execute the strategy. In the long term, it feeds back the foresight perspectives that strategic decisions and forecast assumptions depend upon. The Business Partner becomes the thread that connects today’s decision to tomorrow’s outcome.

Towards Dual Accuracy: A Framework for the Practitioner

How does one achieve this integration in practice? Drawing on the Futures Cone, the FPAC Body of Knowledge, Beyond Budgeting principles, and the insights from my Strategic Foresight series, I propose four interconnected practices:

1. Calibrate accuracy to the time horizon. The near-term forecast (process as is) continues to be measured by variance to actuals. Medium-term scenarios (1–5 years) should be measured by the quality of assumptions and the range of scenarios explored. A lean process should run no less than twice a year. Long-term foresight should be measured by the organisation’s preparedness across multiple plausible futures. An existing Strategic Foresight process covers that. This should clarify that decimal precision for a ten-year outlook is not rigor but category error.

2. Use Scenarios to Connect the Futures Cone to the financial plan. As I argued in Part 3 of my Foresight series, FP&A scenarios should be explicitly mapped to the Futures Cone. Which of our scenarios describes probable futures? Which explores plausible alternatives? Which reflects our preferred direction? And critically: how do our planned actions affect both the probability and preferability of each scenario? This alignment shows motion and creates a shared language between finance and strategy.

3. Clarify targets from forecasts, and both from foresight. This is where Beyond Budgeting’s contribution is indispensable. Targets can and should be ambitious. Forecasts must be realistic and unbiased. Foresight must be imaginative and broad. Conflating these three into a single “budget number” destroys the accuracy of all three. Draw each line distinctly and clearly, then compose them into a coherent whole. Forecast with confidence, discuss its influence on the way to the target, and look out for the motion of the target.

4. Institutionalise dual accuracy reviews. Monthly forecast reviews should include a brief foresight checkpoint: have any weak signals emerged that challenge our assumptions? Quarterly reviews should include scenario validation: are our scenarios still plausible, or has the world moved? Annual planning cycles should include one or two foresight refresh cycles: what new futures have entered the cone that we must prepare for? This rhythm, rather than a one-off foresight exercise, builds the organisational muscle for dual accuracy.

The Strategic Compass: From Variance Reduction to Future Readiness

“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.” 

Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author, futurist, and inventor

The Blue Ocean Strategy calls to create new, uncontested market spaces.[4] The parallel for FP&A and this series is striking. Locked in forecast accuracy, the competition in the red ocean is variance analysis: who can explain the deviation best, who can forecast most precisely, who can close the books fastest.

The blue ocean is about connecting operational precision with strategic imagination. That means being the team that not only reports where the ship is relative to the planned course, but also scouts the waters ahead for icebergs that no chart has yet recorded. This is the promise of dual accuracy — and it is the natural evolution of the Business Partner role.

Peter Thommen, long-time CFO at IKEA and a pioneer of foresight integration whom I interviewed in Part 2 of the Foresight series [6], captured this eloquently when he observed that foresight is not strategy, but without it, strategy is blind. The same can be said of accuracy: forecast accuracy is not strategic accuracy, but without it, strategic accuracy has no foundation.

Closing Thought: The Accuracy That Matters

“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” 

Malcolm X, civil rights leader and orator

FP&A should always measure the accuracy of its forecasts. That is right and proper. But the profession’s strategic value lies in a deeper form of accuracy: the accuracy of its questions. Are we forecasting the right things? Are we preparing for the right futures? Are we equipping decision-makers not just with numbers, but with the navigational clarity to act with confidence in ambiguity?

A couture atelier that produces a technically flawless dress for the wrong occasion has failed. An FP&A function that delivers a perfect forecast for a future that never materialises has, too. The art lies in combining the precision of the measurement with the wisdom of the vision. Tomorrow’s success is decided today — but only if today’s decisions are informed by both the rigour of the forecast and the breadth of the foresight.

The integration of forecasting, scenario planning, Beyond Budgeting, and Strategic Foresight is not an academic exercise. It is the practical agenda for any FP&A function that aspires to genuine Business Partnership. It is the pathway from accurately reporting the past to accurately preparing for the future. And it begins, as all enduring craftsmanship does, with the commitment to draw clean lines in a complex world.

References and Further Reading

1. Hope, J. & Fraser, R. (2003). Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap. Harvard Business School Press.

2. Bogsnes, B. (2016). Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Unlocking the Performance Potential. Wiley.

3. Kim, W.C. & Mauborgne, R. (2005). Blue Ocean Strategy. Harvard Business Review Press.

4. Association for Financial Professionals (AFP). Certified Corporate FP&A Professional (FPAC) Body of Knowledge.

5. FP&A Trends Group. FP&A Maturity Model.

6. Wienefoet, T. (2025). Strategic Foresight: How CFOs Turn Uncertainty into Advantage — Parts 1–3. FP&A Trends.