Environmental Scanning
In benign business environments, there is little need to face the future. Yesterday’s solutions accommodate most needs and challenges; resource management can be systematized and run on autopilot.
Today’s business environment is anything but benign, subjected instead to waves of change from social, cultural, political, technical, and economic innovations and transformations. The future for your company or organization will most likely differ greatly from any previous historical experience … with some futurists predicting as much as 90% of what you will need to thrive and prosper over the next decade lying outside your industry as you know it today.
Advances in communication and technology … the changing role of management and leadership … an onslaught of generational and workforce issues … the accelerating growth of consolidation and mergers throughout our global economy … a mindset toward what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan calls “instant optimization of resources and return of investment” … the rapid increase, for many companies and organizations, in outsourcing and co-sourcing of functions, products, and services … the sudden and vital need for industry image-building in increasingly crowded markets … and the ever shifting sands of competition and alliances … these and other trends require you actively engage the future.
Yesterday’s solutions will not accommodate tomorrow’s needs and challenges. Effective resource management will require fast, fluid, and flexible systems, systems able to adapt to and minimize multiple waves of disruption, while profiting from emerging opportunities.
To drift submissively in this period of profound and ongoing change invites disaster. Yet few companies and organizations are willing to invest the time and resources necessary to undertake an ongoing search for clues about how their world is changing.
What is Environmental Scanning (ES)
ES is an organized and ongoing effort to uncover clues about how the world is changing … and how these changes are likely to affect your organization or business. Though ES can take many forms, most scanning efforts include:
- Examining a wide range of issues (social, cultural, political, technical, and economic)
- Gathering information from a broad variety of sources
- Tapping into the insight and expertise of leading-edge thinkers
- Studying trends and changes occurring in unrelated industries, professions, and geographic areas.
ES efforts systematically survey, identify, and interpret relevant threats and opportunities, in an attempt to answer two simple questions with profound implications:
- What is coming?
- What will it mean for us?
By detecting signals, following trends, monitoring change processes, providing early identification of future threats, and alerting managers, members, and other stakeholders to emerging opportunities, Environmental Scanning empowers organizations and businesses to profitably embrace the future.
The Phill Domask Consultancy can help you to integrate ES into your strategic planning efforts: click HERE to learn how.
Environmental Scanning Resources
Book: Corporate Radar by Karl Albrecht
Online:
- Environmental Scanning, by James L. Morrison
- Environmental Scanning as Information Seeking and Organizational Learning, by Chun Wei Choo
- Environmental Scanning: A Holistic Approach to Identifying and Assessing Weak Signals of Change, by Wendy L. Schultz