Environmental scanning is the core of effective strategy and long term thinking. Scanning provides you with high quality information that lets you understand what is happening today and identify changes that are coming that will have an impact on your organisation. Scanning gives you the time to think about what will be relevant for your organisation, and what possible responses to those changes you might have.
Thinking Futures works with you to build an in-house environmental scanning capacity to embed scanning in your existing strategy development and planning processes. Since strategy is about determining how to position yourself in the external environment to ensure a sustainable future, understanding that environment and its likely impact on your organisation in some depth is critical to identifying robust strategy.
This process involves training for your staff, development of a scanning framework, support for staff doing the scanning, and working with your core scanning group to analyse and report scanning output in ways that make sense to your organisation.
All Thinking Futures projects therefore usually begin with environmental scanning, typically undertaken with and by your staff to ensure knowledge transfer about how to explore the environment takes place. Scanning does suffer from the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ effect though, so ensuring your staff are trained to know how to seek out meaningful information is an essential step in setting up a scanning system.
Strategy that readies you for the future is based on insights gained from identifying, exploring, interpreting and challenging information gained through rigorous environmental scanning. Looking over the horizon or horizon scanning are terms often used to describe the monitoring of external trends and drivers of change to explore their potential impact on your organisation into the future.
To find out more about doing scanning in your organisation, you can:
- organise an in-house workshop to explore what value scanning will bring to your work,
- download an information sheet on working with Thinking Futures to set up a scanning system, and
- contact Maree to talk about your particular scanning needs.
You can also:
- download the free guide, Environmental Scanning: what it is and how to do it,
- watch the supporting webinar and get access to additional resources about scanning, and
- watch the slidehow right here.
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