scanning

Planning, scanning, forecasting: It’s the verb, not the noun

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In exploring the future, it’s the journey that counts most, not the plan, report, or briefing you produce. Remembering that is essential. You need to make sure your colleagues, clients, bosses understand that the value and power of the journey is foremost. You don’t want your key stakeholders to wait for the “answers” they think you should produce for them, you want them in on the process.

The process is about rehearsing flexible thinking, alternate views, what ifs, and contingencies. You can’t explore all the possible what ifs, and should not try.

Instead, learn from the thinking you do in exploring a range of possibilities. By that you can get better at facing uncertainty with assurance that you and your colleagues build into your thinking resilience against the unexpected. Chances are, your plans will be robust in a range of different outcomes–you can hope so.

Dwight Eisenhower understood this:

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning”

–Speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (14 November 1957) [Link]

A great tool for this journey is scenario planning. A set of scenarios is a sampling of a range of what ifs against which you can build some plans and strategies. But your set is never a complete view of the possible future. And most of all, it’s the process of exploring alternative futures with scenarios that matters most. You can find a lot more about scenarios here.

(My colleague Jennifer Jarratt reminded me of this quote, and I am grateful in this, as in so much of her work, for her ideas and inspiration.)

Eisenhower’s little bit of wisdom, like so many quotes, has taken up residence on the Internet in a paraphrase, cut loose from its true moorings in Ike’s speeches and writing. It turns up most often as “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential”.

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Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias

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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.
  • Watch “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel
  • 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!

Is environmental scanning just one more chore?

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A few weeks ago, I gave a talk to a group of association executives on environmental scanning. My proposed title for the talk was "Environmental Scanning 2.0," by which I wanted to reflect the potential and power we have in harnessing new tools and the network to make envirobmental scanning much more effective. My host urged me to use a title clearer to my audience, so we went with "Technology, Members, and Effective Environmental Scanning." Just another chore? In my view and based on comments I got, the talk went very well. My audience had thoughtful questions. Most of them said they did not currently do environmental scanning, but I think that reflected their assumption that that would entail a somewhat formal process culminating in a report, called "environmental scan." I advocated, as I have here on foresightculture.com, for making scanning a daily, continuous habit, a part of building a culture of foresight. I told them about online tools they can use, such as RSS feeds and iGoogle to organize and "push" information to themselves. I urged them to tap the available technologies such as listservs, GoogleGroups, Facebook, etc. to create sharing and collaborative space for the results of scanning. I also urged them to shop carefully among the sources of information and the tools for accessing and sharing it, and to make sure what they set out to do was going to work for their specific constituencies and situations. Throughout our discussion lingered the question: "Isn’t this just one more task to add to our over-burdened lives?" I tried to show how doing scanning differently could help the cause of busy executives trying to be effective. Inevitably, however, each of those in attendance will have to decide how important new insights on change and better readiness for dealing with emerging issues and opportunities is to them and their team. The value of scanning has to outweigh the added burden. By making scanning a part of the fabric of each day, it’s my hope people can avoid adding it as a task. I try to be sure to show people how more important than adding new sources information to what they see is attaching meaning to it-meaning for them in their organizations. I hope my group from that Friday’s meeting arrived at that thought, and understood that new efforts and a clearer focus on how to fit scanning into their work is worth it.

Update: Please see also this special page on environmental scanning.

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