The aim of environmental scanning is to identify relevant information for your organisation, both trends and weak signals of change appearing on the horizon, in order to broaden and deepen thinking about strategic options. It is about ensuring that there are no surprises in the future operating environment for your organisation – that is, avoiding organisational myopia.
Scanning is of most value when it is focused or anchored around issues of current concern to your organisation. Alternatively, there may be a fork-in-the-road decision that needs to be made in the near future, and you need to get more information about the likely implications of your options before you make a decision.
At the end of the scanning process, you are aiming to have a report that details relevant trends in the external environment that are likely to have a significant impact on the way you do business in the future, and the implications of those trends on your organisation’s strategy.
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Before you start scanning, you need to reflect on your worldview – how you create meaning from your experience of the world, how you filter events, what you accept to ‘real’ and what you dismiss as irrelevant or rubbish.
Our minds are wonderful things, but they are habitual things as well. There are no future facts so, when scanning, we will be making a subjective assessment of the value of the scanning hits we identify.
In this process, we need to be wary of allowing our minds to retreat to explanations and assessments based on what is already known. We need to ensure that our minds don’t shut down when something new doesn’t match expected patterns. If you have a reaction along the lines of 'that's rubbish!" or "that will never happen!", you have hit an assumption wall.
Stop and ask yourself why you might have had that reaction. Ask what would have to happen to make what you have find more realistic, or simply ask what would it mean if it was true? Challenge your assumptions about why you see the world the way you do.
If you are not alert to your worldview when scanning, you will miss things that just might be important, and you will make assumptions that may be just plain wrong. You will continue to operate in a reactive, crisis management mode.
Scanning is not about being certain, but rather about being comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. It is about moving beyond traditional and familiar sources and thinking in new ways about existing and potential markets, emerging technologies and new business models. It is about looking beyond current ways of working to what might be needed in the future. In short, scanning requires open minds. |
It is vital that you know that when doing environmental scanning know it is okay and necessary to look outside the box, at the weird and the whacky, at what is emerging at the periphery.
This means that as well as identifying issues that are topical and relevant today, you should also be looking far and wide for signals about how those issues might play out into the future. You need to be curious.
For example, if there is a government report on skill shortages that is an operational imperative today, try to identify the drivers of this imperative, and then explore how those drivers might evolve over time. Think about what challenges might emerge, and what decisions your organisation might have to make to address those challenges.
Monitoring the periphery is an ongoing task, since your first scanning 'hit' will not be definitive in terms of its relevance for your organisation. It will take time to either build into something you need to pay attention to, or disappear from view.
To be successful, environmental scanning must scan well beyond today. Aim at 5-10 years out, but don’t be afraid to go out further. This is one time when following links on the internet to see where you end up is probably a good thing. |
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