Environmental scanning (also known as horizon scanning) is part of anticipating the future. It's done by systematically gathering information about current and changing conditions. Good foresight requires environmental scanning for understanding emerging change.
Scanning is a lot of work, but other people already do it for you. Being efficient means scanning the scanners.
How do you scan the scanners?
Find the bloggers, news sites, podcasts, etc. that cover the range of news and information you need to monitor. Online sources, including tons of free ones, do this work well. You can fine-tune what you look at to tap well-curated sources.
My interests flop all over the place, and I find value in a rich mix of places. It's an ever-changing landscape of sources, but some I find valuable these days are: Reddit Futurology, PSFK, Slinking Toward Retirement, Boing Boing, and various of my savvy friends' twitter feeds.
My colleagues are scanners who curate insights with a focus on the Future of Packaging on Twitter at @packfutur, and on the future of work at @50PlusatWork on Twitter and the Future of Work on Facebook.
Your best strategy is to find a manageable set of sources. "Automate" your monitoring by subscribing to email newsletters, using social media, or RSS feeds. That means information will flow to you. You won't have to remember to check multiple sources.
Keep fine-tuning your set of sources. Ditch anything that wastes your time. Add sources when you have a particular focus or project.
One caution. You can be too tailored in your strategy. Allow in some variety, alternative views, and serendipity. You will make discoveries that way, instead of allowing confirmation bias to get ahold of you.
You can't innovate in a vacuum. Foresight opens new space for exploring change and discovering opportunities.
In product innovation, it’s essential to look beyond the boundaries of the current market for your products. You need to explore at least five or ten years into the future for fresh insights. And you need to test your assumptions about the marketplace and how it's changing.
In brand innovation, a futures view tests assumptions about emerging change in values, attitudes, lifestyles, and consumption. It helps you fine tune your understanding of how consumers will understand and value a brand.
Without those enhanced views, you risk misunderstanding the patterns of change and missing opportunities. And you raise the risk of product failure or a mis-fire in marketing or brand development.
What you can do
For the most robust innovation efforts, build foresight into your work. Innovation teams should discuss leading-edge change and where it may steer the marketplace. Making future outcomes explicit sharpens the view of emerging needs and opportunities.
A baseline environmental scan of the most critical forces and trends shaping society will fuel a team's creative thinking and fortify its understanding of the marketplace.
Scenarios help you test product/service ideas against a clearer view of the future.
Those are just two foresight tools among many that will enhance and enrich your innovation processes.
Confirmation bias is getting attention in American politics. It is the tendency we have to pre-filter what we see and read according to our established views. Confirmation bias closes our minds to new ideas and other viewpoints. We end up in a protective bubble of our own making.
This is also a trap in foresight. The act of exploring for information and ideas about change is called environmental scanning. (Also called horizon scanning.) It is the work of collecting information, links, observations, etc. to better understand change and explore future possiblities. Confirmation bias afflicts scanning. It leads us to see only things that confirm our beliefs about the future. In fact, even your set of digital or paper filing categories can trick you into missing other changes.
This is a inevitable risk, and you have do two things to overcome it:
1). develop an approach that ensures you encounter new ideas in new categories. Don't just collect things that confirm what you have already decided is true. Read opposing views on purpose. Move towards divergent thoughts instead of away from them.
2). watch yourself and learn to catch yourself at this. Call out your biases when they happen. Carry your awareness of them into situations like when you will meet people with different world views.
Breaking through your own biases is a win. You should delight in discoveries as you read and observe that don't fit your understanding or or your categories. Get excited about finding out you're wrong. If you can't file it, leave it on the desk top. It's got an important insight for you. Pop that bubble.
You move, always, into the future. But what future? Well, there are two kinds:
1). The future you can shape. [“You make it”]
Defining this future is about exploring the changes you can influence and clarifying the outcomes you want. A future you strive for is called a normative future, and there is little reason, across the sweep of change you can influence, not to drive toward the one you want. But too many people don't figure out what they want because they feel subject to, or even victim of the future.
Your vision of a desired future will focus you on things you have a part in shaping. But defining it has to account for the other kind of future, the future you are subject to.
2). The future you are subject to. [“You take it”]
This future is in your external context. It is a product of the forces and changes that will happen no matter what you do, or that you have, at best, only a small chance of influencing. To explore this future, you need to understand the forces of change and identify how you can respond to them to better reach the future you want.
This future is tricky, since there is no way to absolutely predict it. You have to stay prepared for a range of possibilities.
If you don't yet understand the external future, you better get to work now to clarify. Otherwise, you won't have much chance at determining where it it there is the future you can have, or discovering how you will strive for it.
It's an easy trap for people and organizations to think that all they can do is address this second future, to try to just keep up with change. But reversing this, and identifying goals and visions of a desired future, can take you from a sense of being stuck, to a sense of command of your destiny.
I made the case in my previous post Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds that experiencing the future is vital to good foresight and benefits organizations. I don’t claim to be a practitioner of the most exciting and advanced experiential futures, but I have decades’ experience getting real business execs in real organizational situations to engage the future better, adding experiences that fit what business seems able to embrace and make useful.
Below I offer some “how to” suggestions for making foresight more experiential. For more on the leading edge, have a look at The Sceptical Futuryst, Stuart Candy’s blog—his topic list is chock full of intriguing and valuable ideas about helping people experience the future. And try a Google search on “experiential futures”.
The ideas below range from the simple to the somewhat more challenging and complex.
Better scanning – See Talk to the Frog and the ideas I share in Ideas on effective environmental scanning in the digital age which make the case for understand how the world is changing better, where possible experiencing that change first hand. The philosophy there is, “get out from behind the mouse.” This is the key to getting a more visual, tactile, and experiential sense of future possibilities–where the first clues or examples of them are in our world now.
Clear ideas about the future – The best foresight concepts are evocative descriptions of future possibilities, which begin to get our heads into something new. For example, the concept of virtual reality. This kind of futures experience is in our thoughts, but that is already more powerful than just engaging with data and analysis about change.
An image of something that may become big in our future. The Espresso Book Machine produces books on demand
Images – There are, by definition, no pictures of the future. But we can do at least two things about that:
1). Create pictures of the future as an artist can, or you can do without art skills, simply doodling, collaging, etc. and
2). Finding pictures of things that may already exist, but aren’t commonplace, and represent something we may see much more of in the future. For example, a picture of a goods-producing kiosk such as the Espresso Book Machine is inspiring of a wide-range of future ideas about goods produced on demand.
Role playing – Having people get their heads into a particular identity, different from their own, is a powerful way to begin to shift their understanding and give them a different experience. And you can get a group to do this together, putting them into a simulated situation where their identities and circumstances are different, showcasing what might be true in the future. We also like to work with the “TOPs” (technical, organizational, and personal) multiple perspectives method with groups. This concept, described in detail here, was originated by futurist and systems science expert Hal Linstone. It helps a group understand the common perspectives that shape and are shaped by an organization’s decisions. We’ve had great success asking a group to break into three groups, each taking up one of these perspectives to confront issue or ideas about change.
“suffering” – A version of role playing is to have people lose something, or simulate losing something to highlight a potential future change. We had this experience with a futures team who decided to have those participating in a dinner be fed in three ways: normal food, a lavish feast, and plain rice and (simulated) dirty water. Each group had something to think and talk about, from different, simulated perspectives. You can also consider the opposite of “suffering”–Why not try out some utopian ideas and get people to describe and play with what the future would be like if something great happened, such as the end of hunger or cancer.
Getting people to see, touch, experience the leading edge of change: Packaging Executives visit a Center for Hard to Recycle Materials
In the world – It’s particular powerful with office-bound people to get them “out from behind the mouse” and out into experiences different from their own. That can mean seeing things that exist today, but that represent a change we will likely see more of. For example, we put a group of packaging executives on a bus and took them first to a standard municipal recycling plant and then to a center for hard to recycle materials (aka a “CHaRM”). The CHaRM is a rare facility–at the time there were only a few in the world. But it may represent a vital future in their business. Despite their being in the packaging business, some had never been to a conventional recycling facility, let alone to a CHaRM. It was eye-opening for some and idea-provoking for most of them. I reflected on this kind of experience in an earlier post, Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias which advocates for you getting loose of whatever built-in perspectives and biases you might have.
Scenario building – I’ve written several times about the scenario method and my fondness for it. Its power in really getting people’s head into the future is remarkable and reliable. Scenarios go far beyond basic trend analysis and forecasting to depict in words and/or pictures whole futures, with the changes we are thinking about portrayed in real situations. The greatest power of the method is in experiencing the process, though the outputs can be terrific tools for communicating about the future and sharing the experience with others.
Farmville and other mobile/web games teach people about big complex systems
Gaming – Games give players the power to shape future outcomes. They are a way to bring alive the forces and countercurrents possible that we try to convey in scenarios. Consider for example the power of fantasy ball teams in bringing to life the meaning and power of strategic decisions. More games are about life and decisions than ever. The mobile/computer game Farmville is teaching its virtual farmer users about climate change, for example.
Other tools, techniques and methods
Virtual worlds – online and console gaming can simulate futures in elaborate and immersive ways, including allowing players to game out outcomes of decisions.
Experiential scenarios – a method for bringing future possibilities more alive for people’s learning and understanding, debate and discussion. It goes beyond art and narrative storytelling to, for example, create experiences in the real world, such as simulating a pandemic’s effects on a city, as was done in Coral Cross.
Artifacts from the future – a long-time feature at the back of Wired magazine that features similated objects; consumer products, for example, from some future year. See: Found futures.
No matter how far into the experiential to reach, you’ll gain something from working to bring the future more alive with your colleagues. It’s worth the effort and the risk you’ll take. Give it a try!
Images: Espresso Book Machine via ondemandbooks.com, CHaRM by jbmahaffie, Farmville by tankgore1 via Flickr
Once you have recognized that you cannot assume continuity across the systems, technologies, relationships, etc. you depend on, you should recognize that you have to ask some tough questions: “Do we have a future?” “What makes us think so?” “What could disrupt the systems we rely on?” and “What do we have to do to ensure our future?” You have to ask these questions bravely and honestly, getting past assumptions of continuity.
The scanning that supports probing those questions has a different character than routine organizational scanning. It puts a focus on the fundamental and big systems in global society, on changes in technology, on changing in the global economy, and on threats from other areas of knowledge and professions. It lets in the more-speculative provocations and leading edge of change discoveries that are not normally on an organization’s radar screen, or that it may have difficulty conceptualizing and facing.
A valuable step in the process is to build positive and negative scenarios for the organization’s future, and use them to explore the potential for disruptive change. The scenarios don’t assume continuity. Some of them challenge it, and propose alternative futures in which there is sharp change or negative outcomes. Those possibilities need to be the focus of scanning and monitoring regarding the organization’s future.
If your “what if” scenarios don’t shake people up, they probably are not about the tough questions you need to ask.
Did the makers of slide rules assume too much continuity?
An organization’s routine strategymaking has to include ongoing explorations of the forces, issues, and trends in its internal and external environment. That is environmental scanning, and the process is routine for any well-led organization. But too often our scanning focus is too narrow and is based on assumptions of continuity.
Here’s why that happens. When you look at your future from today, and explore the topics you already know are part of your business, you are focusing tightly on your existing systems, processes, relationships, technologies, and the trends and forces shaping them. In doing that, you can too easily assume your organization, or your profession, or your sector, or your product/technology will continue as it has. And unfortunately, that’s the kind of routine environmental scanning that organizations do.
Is this what the makers of “adding machines”—the mechanical calculators of three or four decades ago thought? The slide rule? Probably. They just kept working to get better at the same business, assuming continuity.
But your continuity is not assured—it is essential to question it. Bigger things—things you may not be looking at carefully—can disrupt or destroy the pathway you are on. You need to question that pathway, and explore what could change your game entirely. That means asking some tough questions and changing the way you explore your future. Those points are the subject of another post.
If you work at anticipating and understanding the future, you are in a permanent, 24/7, 365 day-a-year environmental scan. It's what you do, on the job or off.
But that means endless opportunity to distract yourself, if you are doing a good, broad scan of lots of sources of information. That kind of scan, done right, means you are not sure what you are going to find as you work–you have to be "all over the map". It's what you're supposed to do..
So you have a problem: you find it hard to focus the scanning on your current needs and work–it's too open and exploratory. You can easily get lost, or use up time exploring, unsure if you should be doing that.
Don't try to narrow what you look at, you need the power and value of the view broad. But you also need a bring some discipline to your scanning efforts.
Here is a triage approach you can use. Consider three categories of information, and how to handle them:
1. Short and of immediate use — things related to your current work. Read, process, share, etc. right now. Get the value from these sources as you discover them.
2. Park for later today or sometime soon, when you are not working on this particular task — things of near-at-hand use, such as on a different task or project than the one you are doing now. You might leave these on your bookmark bar.
3. Long read, extended viewing, etc. for my leisure time or reading time — things that you can tell are good to know, are informative or educational, but are more speculatively-linked to your work. Save links to these, download, print, bookmark, etc. There are lots of ways to do this, and you can find one that fits you. I use the Instapaper web app. I just click on "Read Later" and then go to my Instapaper collection, download them to an e-reader, and read them when I have time.
Your version of this approach can make a different to your productivity, and perhaps your sanity, as you work to be effective at scanning.
Image: Brian Gratwicke, via Flickr, creative commons attribution license
If you are reading this, you probably work in some kind of white collar job. There’s a fair chance you didn’t work in a factory when you were younger, though maybe you worked in construction, on a farm, or in food service or retail. If you currently or used to work in manufacturing, you do not need to read further.
So do you have much experience with how things are made? Not having a close, tactile sense of that may limit your thinking about commerce, industry, products, and so on. Or, if you have some grounding in one industry, and how its products are made, you may not know much about any other. I am not judging anyone about this, it’s my affliction too. The closest I got to “production” was helping artisans in candlemaking, pottery, and other arts. And I had a blue-collar summer job in park maintenance. But the first time I saw manufacturing was when I toured the Harley Davidson Factory in York, Pennsylvania, when I was a young adult.
Why does this matter to foresight? If you want to do the best you can at understanding the emerging future, you need to try to know something about a lot of things. And this is an example of a gap in understanding that is pretty common among my colleagues and the business executives I work with.
I find it easy for my futurist colleagues, and my clients, for example, to focus on potential change in consumer life and lifestyles—we are all consumers. It’s not hard to look at change in the consumer marketplace with a great familiarity about the situations consumers are in, their values and tastes—at least for the center cut demographic of people in one’s own society.
But it’s much harder to get people to: 1). Understand and think about the business processes that are behind the scenes, 2). Remember whole groups of stakeholders in how things are changing in the world—the businesses and people that produce things, provide energy, and so on.
What can you do about this? I can’t help you fully overcome the problem, but I am a strong advocate for working intently, if modestly, on it. Here are things you might try to do:
Take factory tours, [see this site for information on a lot of the public tours in the US], but also try to look for some that are not the official, available-to-tourists tours. If you can get a friend to give you a behind the scenes tour, terrific. Nevertheless, some public tours are terrific. I learned a lot and really enjoyed: Miller Coors, Golden, Colorado, Martin Guitars, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, Harley Davidson, York, Pennsylvania, and Blue Bell Ice Cream, in Brenham, Texas.
Go to trade shows—often they are free, and in most cities, nearby. It doesn’t matter too much which ones, branch out from what you know, take some of these in, lurk, talk to people, touch things.
Read odd (to you) trade journals from time to time. You may not understand a lot of what you are seeing, but you’ll deepen your sense of what’s out there, and knowing more about what you don’t know is a good thing.
You can also look for “how it’s made” videos on YouTube, there are lots of them. But don’t let more web surfing offset time you might take to go and see real things!
Interview a friend in an industry you don’t understand, and maybe even take a learning journey with your friend to factories, distribution centers, R&D facilities, etc.
Go look at things, explore, and drive around back of things, literally and figuratively
One of the best things my colleagues and I did a few years ago with our multisponsor program group on the future of packaging was take them to a recycling facility in Boulder, Colorado. Though these were packaging executives, responsible, in many cases, for packaging recycling, they found the tour revealing and stimulating.
All of this is fun and interesting. You can probably take your family or friends. It is environmental scanning—the non-sedentary kind—and so it is a proper part of your work. It can make a pretty big difference in at least reminding us that there is more—much more—to know. And please, if you find this works well for you, let me know!
Sorry, no, not offering free samples! (Though you can always lure me in to sharing thoughts on the future with you). But I can share tips on getting deeper thinking and scouting on the future going, costing you only some time, and less of that than you would spend otherwise.
Sometimes there’s a little bit of lead time when you will be exploring the issues, forces, and trends at play for a particular subject. If you have at least a few weeks before you’ll start really probing a new topic, you can “chum the waters” a bit, and get data flowing and insights percolating. It makes a difference, first, to tell your colleagues and friends that you’re looking into the topic. Feed them some insights you have, maybe even provocative ones they cannot help responding to. Make it interesting. Get the sharing going and your colleagues will become scouts—they often can’t help but think about the topic on your behalf, and share a thought or two along the way, once you’ve started them. Also, you’ll owe them some news on what you found out—share back! And you will owe them your best thoughts when it’s their turn to pose questions.
Second, you can sign up for newsletters, newfeeds, listservs and so on, in advance of plunging into the topic more earnestly. For example, if you have a topic that isn’t likely to have a lot of content flowing on the Internet, but that will have some, you can create a Google Alert, which will send you an email with links whenever the topic, constructed as a search, comes up on the Web. This will get you a range of intelligence on the topic, and it will “push” that information to you, regularly, until you ask Google to stop.
Third, there are a number of blogs and e-news sources that report on the big trends at play. Their authors are doing work you might otherwise have to do. We can wonder why they offer it up for free, but better yet is to quietly enjoy the fruits of their labor, and be happy they are doing it. As you do research and reading, look for which sources keep coming up as useful to you, and make them a regular stop, or set up to get their new postings.
These are just a couple of ways to get a bit of help, at no cost (but your time). I use them all the time as I explore a changing set of futures issues. They are good foresight habits to cultivate and adapt to your needs.
Scanning is a lot of work, but other people already do it for you. Being efficient means scanning the scanners.
