What is Horizon Scanning?
Horizon, or Environmental, Scanning is the art of systematically exploring the external environment to (1) better understand the nature and pace of change in that environment, and (2) identify potential opportunities, challenges, and likely future developments relevant to your organization. Environmental Scanning explores both new, strange, and weird ideas, as well as persistent challenges and trends today.

Scanning objectives²

• Detecting: important economic, social, cultural, environmental, health, scientific, technological, and political trends, situations, and events.
• Identifying: the potential opportunities and threats for the organization implied by these trends, situations, and events.
• Determining: an accurate understanding of an organization's strengths and limitations.
• Providing: a basis for analysis of future program investments.

Source¹: Aguillar 1967 and Choo 1998
Source²: Scanning objectives

Horizon Scanning is both an intelligence led and evidence-based* method for obtaining answers to key question(s) about the future. It is the best place to start when one or more people desire more information on a particular upcoming trend, uncertainty, or wild card that may affect them or their organization, or, when an organization wants to watch specific issues to spot upcoming change.

Horizon Scanning is analogous to an early warning radar, a continuous process of pinging the environment to identify signals of change. An excellent early warning radar looks at all aspects of the global environment. Locating sources** of change from everywhere, evaluating likelihood, monitoring growth, and tracking spread provides the early warning system for impending change.

By collecting, analyzing, and picturing what's likely/unlikely to happen within the global environment, mental models of possible and probable futures can be created from which preferable futures can be chosen. By choosing preferable futures people and organizations shape their and our tomorrows.

The goal of Horizon Scanning is therefore to always describe "How will the future be different?" while Strategic Thinking and Action Planning respectively determine "Where the focus should be" and "What should be done about it?"

Effective scanning calls for formal searching, using formal methodologies to obtain information for a specific purpose. It is systematic. It is much more than reading newspapers or industry journals, or checking the latest statistics about your market. It is about exploring both present certainty and future uncertainty, and moving beyond what we accept as valid ways of doing things today. Sources can be "Hard/Quantitative" - statistical data sets or "Soft/Qualitative" - personal perspectives on possibilities or issues.

Most people in management positions in organizations would say that they scan the environment, and indeed, nearly all of us are doing some form of scanning in our personal and professional lives every day – whether we realize it or not.

For strategy purposes, however, environmental scanning needs to be formal and systematic, and focused around a particular interest or critical decision being faced by the organization. It is an activity usually undertaken as part of a broader strategy development process.

Remember that it is vital that you know that when you scan it is both okay and necessary to look outside the box. This means that as well as identifying trends and issues that are topical and relevant today, you should also be looking far and wide for signals about how those issues might play out into the future, and what new issues are emerging that you need to consider. You need to be curious and exercise both focal and peripheral vision looking for the "perceived" environment (the one that we notice and talk about) and the "pertinent environment," the one that can change the organization.

For example, if there is a government report on skill shortages that is an operational imperative today, identify the drivers of this imperative, and then explore how those drivers might evolve over time. Think about what challenges might emerge, and what decisions your organization might have to make to address those challenges. Will it always be an issue, or might it shift or disappear?

This is one time when following links on the Internet to see where you end up is a good thing.

Without a structured approach to scanning, you will just be aimlessly scanning the web, and luck will be the only determinant of whether or not you find something useful. Discipline yourself to know you are off your topic, stop researching and try a different search until you feel you have exhausted the key possibilities.




Pre-requisites

• "Out of the box" thinking, an open mind, and a desire to discover new things
• Exposure to many sources, ideas, and challenges
• Looking beyond personal and organizational comfort zones and speciazations
• Noting opportunities and risks in an ordered fashion

With practice you will attune your mind and be able to spot potential upcoming change accurately, quickly, and effectively.

Scanning timeframes ¹

• Ad-hoc scanning - Short term, infrequent examinations usually initiated by a crisis
• Regular scanning - Studies done on a regular schedule (say, once a year)
• Continuous scanning - (also called continuous learning) - continuous structured data collection and processing on a broad range of environmental factors

Most commentators feel that in today's turbulent business environment the best scanning method available is continuous scanning. This allows the firm to act quickly, take advantage of opportunities before competitors do, and respond to environmental threats before significant damage is done.

Scanning methods

• Collaborative foresight: Engaging the organization's people
  
• Surveys: Using surveys of stakeholders to elicit their views
• Search: Using searches to find material of relevance for answering the question(s)
• Exercises: Conducting internal and external strategic exercises
• Scouting networks: Employing international networks of savvy people to report change

Each can standalone or be employed in conjunction with the other two approaches.

Further references

• Sharpen Your Business Acumen
• How To Predict The Future Of Your Company
  
• Thinking About The Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight
  
• Environmental Scanning¹
• Environmental Scanning: A Holistic Approach
• Was It Good For You?: Subjective-Objective Issues in Applied Futures Research
• Environmental Scanning: What it is and How to Go About It: Maree Conway 2009
  

Personal thanks to Maree Conway for allowing us to quote from "Environmental Scanning: What it is and How to Go About It"

* Source citations including tagging, commenting, faceting, and analysis of material.
** The original provider of the evidence or intelligence noting or commenting on emerging change.

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