How you report your outcomes will depend on what your organization expects from your scanning, or what you know will add value to existing processes. You will probably need to design the specifics of your own report. In any report that you produce, however, make sure you include a statement that makes it clear that the scanning hits and trends are not predictions. Stress this. The trend analysis you are providing is an assessment of what might be possible in the future, not what will be. It is designed to inform thinking about how the organization might need to operate in response to increasing complexity and uncertainty in the external environment. Keep your scanning visible in your organization, and ensure your reports are relevant to your organization and its work, but remember that scanning hit reports are really designed to expose people to what is going on "out there" in the external environment. They should therefore challenge current thinking and make people feel uncomfortable or intrigued.

You will have been producing a weekly report on your scanning hits.



As well as sharing this report among your planning team, you can also share it more broadly across your organization as frequently as is appropriate.

Your scanning hits can be sent out via email (although this has the potential to annoy people whose inboxes are overflowing), or via a website that allows staff to rank the hits on relevance/importance to the organization’s strategy. The latter obviously will cost money to develop, but it allows a degree of interaction not possible with conventional email approaches. One advantage is that the website is always available and staff can check it when they have time, rather than responding to a push email. Shaping Tomorrow offers a purpose built site for this purpose.



Staff views collected in this way help identify those hits you might need to explore further, even if your own scanning is suggesting the hit might not be of major importance. This process is an effective and cost-effective way to gather staff views about the future. Be open, dismiss nothing.

These reports are part of the process of expanding our understanding of the industry and global environment – the trends that are emerging in those spaces that may or may not be directly related to your organization’s business today.

Source: Environmental Scanning, What Is It and How To Do It ... (By kind permission of Maree Conway)

Next: Scanning Strategies Back: Recording Scan Hits To: Shaping Tomorrow

Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.