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Doing Environmental Scanning: An Overview Guide
An overview of the major phases of doing environmental scanning from deciding what to scan, who should scan and what you should do with the information you are finding to strengthen your ability to respond to today’s strategic challenges.
Download the Doing Environmental Scanning Guide
Building Strategic Futures Guide: Environmental Scanning: what it is and how to do it
You can download the guide on environmental scanning which will provide you with detailed steps on how to do environmental scanning in your organisation.
Useful Documents
Some templates and a trend relevance assessment framework that will be useful when you are scanning are available for download. These documents are provided to help you record your scanning hits and trends, and to assess relevance of your trends to your organisation. Please contact me if you have any questions about the documents and how to best use them in your scanning.
More Resources
Download Environmental Scanning webinars.
See also the Input Methods page in the Resources section, which gives you more information about what scanning is all about.
See what I think are the Desired Characteristics of an Environmental Scanner.
Download an information sheet on Environmental Scanning for your Organisation.
Trend Analysis
Want to find out more about how to watch trends and do environmental scanning?
Have a look at trendwatching.com’s top 5 trendwatching tips. While Trendwatching’s focus is consumer trends, these tips about how to scan are valuable.
Scanning Thought Leaders
The work of Slaughter, Voros and Hines informs my environmental scanning approach. The focus is on thinking big, deep and long: broad sources (not just newspapers) and awareness of the worldviews of both the scanner and the potential users of scanning output and a long term perspective. Key references are:
Richard Slaughter (1999) “A new framework for environmental scanning”. Foresight 1 (5): 441-451.
Joseph Voros (2001) “Reframing environmental scanning: an integral approach”. Foresight 3 (6): 533-551.
Andy Hines (2003) “Applying integral futures to environmental scanning”. Futures Research Quarterly, 19 (4) 49-62.
John Mahaffie has written an excellent overview on environmental scanning and how to do it at his blog, Foresight Culture.
Questions? Get in Touch
Please do get in touch with me if you have any questions about doing scanning in your organisation. I am very happy to have a conversation about getting started with scanning.
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