Building
Today, Tomorrow, and the Day After Tomorrow
Published on Jun 22
A while back, I came across a description of how Porsche's design studio organizes its work, and it's quietly reshaped how I think about strategy ever since.
The design team splits their attention across three horizons:
- Today is the model currently in production, refined at the finest level of detail. This is where mid-generation refreshes and software updates happen.
- Tomorrow represents the next generation — the new version that will roll off the line after four to six years.
- Day after tomorrow is the concept work. These visions, from clay models to fully-functioning prototypes, rarely see the light of day, but enable Porsche to dream about the future of mobility.
What struck me most was the direction of the thinking — they dream up the day after tomorrow first, then work backward to decide what tomorrow should be.
When the pressure is on thanks to a soft quarter, tough board meeting, or well-funded competitor making noise, almost every instinct pulls you toward today. Ship the feature. Cut the cost. Close the gap. But it's worth being honest about what's happening underneath. When you starve the longer-term horizons, it creates debt to pay down eventually.
Today announces itself. It has deadlines, dashboards, and people asking about it in every meeting. Tomorrow mostly takes care of itself once a project gets the green light. But the day after tomorrow has none of that. No deadline, no dashboard, no one losing sleep if it slips. It's the first thing to get quietly starved — not by a decision anyone made, but by the absence of one. The discipline isn't picking the right horizon. It's protecting the one that can't protect itself.
Investing in the day after tomorrow with 20-40% of your capacity is particularly valuable when big disruptions take place. Any new technology is likely something you've been experimenting for a while, and you'll know exactly how to make the most of it. This is what separates the companies that compound from the ones that quietly plateau.
A few things this has taught me as a CEO:
Name the horizon for every major effort. Not to bureaucratize it, but because the conversations are completely different. A today project is judged on execution and speed. A day after tomorrow project is judged on what it teaches you, and holding it to a today standard — revenue, adoption, a clean ROI — is the surest way to kill it before it's done anything useful. Mixing up the scorecards is how good long-term bets die early.
Audit where the time goes, not where you say it goes. Most leadership teams will swear they care about the future. Look at the calendar, the budget, and the org chart, and you'll usually find ninety-five percent of the energy living in today with a little spillover into tomorrow. That's not wrong on its face — today pays the bills. But if the number is closer to a hundred, you've stopped investing in the company you'll need to be.
The point of imagining a scenario 10 years out isn't to predict it — you won't. It's to pressure-test the decision in front of you. When you can see, even dimly, where the world might be heading, the choice about what to build next gets clearer and braver. The far horizon isn't a fantasy you escape into. It's the vantage point that makes the near one legible.
None of this requires a big reorg or an innovation lab with a clever name. It mostly requires refusing to let the loudest horizon take all the oxygen, and being willing to spend real attention on work that won't pay you back this year, or maybe ever, in any way you can put on a slide.
The grind of today is never going away, and it shouldn't. The work in front of you is what earns the right to have a tomorrow at all. Just don't let it be the only horizon you can see.