Horizon Scanning involves finding and assessing potential trends, uncertainties, and wild cards to assist present-day decision making, innovation, and risk assessment.

Henry Mintzberg* described the need for strategists to look ahead, beyond, across, behind, above, below, and around for perspective; so it is with Horizon Scanning research. Horizon Scanning research starts with the early identification of potential change through single observations of change; an insight. Researchers then look for more scan hits to further evidence their observations and to identify changing patterns for continuous intelligent reporting.

Insights are raw, diary entries of new, possible, and probable change noticed by researchers. They are an indelible record of eclectic facts, ideas, fads, fashions, and epidemics that allow the fixation of an unrevised perception. They enable us to study events in their own context. Aggegrating insights allows us to spot new patterns of what's growing, falling away, and remaining static.

Change does not happen in a vacuum; there are cumulative signals as trends emerge and gather momentum or critical mass. Horizon Scanning aims to support identifying, and keeping track of, the most significant developments at each stage.

Horizon Scanning is therefore a necessary pre-requisite step to organizational strategic thinking, action planning, and policy making to avoid narrow and shallow decision-making, continual re-work, missed opportunities, and potential shock.

Change lifecycles
The diagram depicts the life cycle of a change, from emerging issue to full-blown trend, both in terms of the number of observable cases, and in terms of public awareness. Perceiving weak signals of change requires very different sources from collecting evidence for more clearly defined issues and trends.

Source: Source: Adapted from Graham Molitor

A robust scanning strategy will monitor change along this curve, using appropriate sources at each level and discriminate between the uses and usefulness of data emerging from different points of the curve. Discriminating between the uses and usefulness of data is essential to manage the tension between requirements for evidence-based strategy and policy making, and the nature of horizon scanning which seeks to extrapolate possible outcomes from limited intelligence. A clear audit trail from fresh evidence and intelligence is essential to Horizon Scanning.

Managing change
Change comes in various ways:

Maturing change

• background - reference site, data site, information
• difference - significant change, distinction from the accepted norm
• policy - strategy, plan, rule, regulation
• trend - pattern, direction, fashion, tendency of past events

Emerging change

• weak signal - weird, wacky, strange, radical, fringe idea
• perspective - mainstream idea, concern, solution
• discovery - first observation, realisation or finding
• transformation - revolution, evolution, radical or directional change
• event - breakdown, outage, incident, disruption
• uncertainty - ambiguity, confusion, dilemma, doubt
• wild cards - surprise, shock, Black Swan

When a change is just emerging, and only a few data points exist with which to characterize it, we can only analyze it via a case study approach; changes indicated by limited data points and observations are referred to as “weak signals” of change. Sources here are likely to include blogs, fringe publications, and conferences.
As a change matures, more and more data points are available with which to analyze it: we can speak of the change as a variable which is displaying a trend in some direction. The more mature the trend, the more likely it is that it has entered the public arena, and thus attracted issue adherents. Sources here are likely to be more formal reports and articles.

Horizon scanning provides a wide range of uncertainties, opportunities, and threats arising from possible changes over time. These range from issues in the mainstream of current thinking (climate change, energy security, and food supply) to those at the edge of planning (transhumanism, animal extinctions, and flying cars).

Horizon scanning therefore explores novel and unexpected issues as well as existing issues or trends.

Further reference*: Henry Mintzberg

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