Environmental Scanning that Makes Sense

As sifting and sorting trends and issues from our information-rich world becomes ever more automated and commoditized, professional futurists are questioning the value of environmental scanning expertise.  The real value has always come from sense-making—helping people and organizations anticipate what could happen, understand the implications and decide how to act.

From the first day I dared call myself a futurist I have always believed the value of these processes are sense-making, learning and leading change.  This month I will be presenting on environmental scanning like the pros at the ASAE Great Ideas Conference.  I genuinely want associations to continually scan their environment for important changes….without relying on someone like me. In order to make good on my promise to give away my trade secrets, I have been examining the state of the art in environmental scanning. 

Yes we do have more tricks of the trade now. My best trick is relying on my colleagues within the Association of Professional Futurists to generously share what they are spotting and learning through our member listserv, blogging and Twitter. This isn’t unique to futurists.  All associations can tap into social networking to crowdsource scanning for their specific field.

Another favorite shortcut is using the monitoring resources of other scanning organizations like the World Future Society, Shaping Tomorrow and a few others I am now putting to the test for their utility. Nothing beats finding a scan of scans because it offers a handy round-up of potentially relevant trends and issues. And when it is time to go deep into a subject, I go deep with foundations, think tanks and study commissions. 

What I really want to teach is not how to scan but how to make sense of what we are learning while we scan.  These are the real tricks of the trade and what I most want to share March 27 with association executives at Great Ideas in Colorado Springs.   When I am sifting and sorting trends and issues, I am searching for these five insights:   

1. Patterns—weak signals in the system that seem to be gaining strength and suggesting major changes ahead
2. Game changers—things that are going wrong or innovations that are going right
3. Strategic issues—leadership opportunities that align with an organization’s perspective & priorities
4. Rates of change—days (breakthroughs), years (adoption cycles) or decades (paradigm shifts)
5. What’s not changing and why

As much as I read and love to learn, I know many people who are better scanners than I can ever hope to be.  They are vacuuming up a universe of information and knowledge in ways I find fascinating.

I am not even alarmed that new tools are making the job of getting to the good stuff easier.  I will keep experimenting with these tools to find the useful ones and encourage others to do the same.

What I am striving to be is really skilled at helping people make sense of how their world is changing and then make strategic and wise decisions about their future.  And the beauty of this aspiration is you never have to be the best read or smartest person in the room to do this job well.  Environmental scanning is just a great means to jumpstart this deeper learning and development in any group that wants to lead change.

A Brief Scan of 21st Century Learning Practices and Priorities

Experts, pundits and futurists often point to the need for individuals and organizations to adopt 21^st century learning priorities and practices, but what are these?  Reflecting on our futures work across different professions and industries, we organized a brief scan overview of the learning this century so far seems to require of individuals and organizations.

For individuals, we see these cognitive skills on the wish lists of many employers and professions:

• Critical thinking & problem solving-- for our complex world and interdependent world
• Creativity and innovation--to create new value & solutions
• STEAM literacy—that’s science, technology, engineering, art and math to give us the baseline knowledge we need. Different fields emphasize different elements but technology literacy challenges individuals everywhere.

Individuals also need to develop a number of competencies to be successful in our world.  These competencies keep coming up across every field:

• Teaming—it’s the new way to work and we’re still figuring out how to do it
• Collaborative leadership— recognizing our fluid work requires leaders to work with others inside and outside their organizations
• Interdisciplinary—boundaries are blurring but we aren’t yet good at working and learning with people from other disciplines
• Cultural competency—take a look at the U.S. census data, enough said
• Lifelong learning & adaptation— yes learning how to learn and keeping up with what to learn requires skill and discipline

As one group correctly observed in looking at our individual and organizational competencies, if individuals have these competencies they can infuse them into their organizations. Here’s what we see topping the list of competencies for many organizations:

• Collaboration— replacing the old behaviors of independence and competition with new ways of working is not easy
• Innovation—adopting practices and processes that promote individual and collaborative initiative to improve everything we do
• Anticipatory learning/foresight—waiting to be blind-sided by the future is neither smart strategy nor good stewardship
• Change & complexity—implementing the new direction, ideas and strategy in a world filled with complicated people and challenging situations

Organizations are creating new structures with these attributes to help individuals and organizations learn more effectively:

• Networked—taking full advantage of online platforms and collaboration technologies
• On-demand—from online resources to mobile and embedded decision systems, we want the answers at our fingertips
• Technology-supported— this is a demanding learning curve to make the right investments in learning technologies to deliver on expectations
• Curating/knowledge management—learning is happening everywhere through experiences and in multiple media channels and organizations need better systems to collect and distribute this learning

These are the 21^st century learning priorities and practices we’re tracking across our futures work for associations serving members in lots of different fields. What would you add to this scan of what individuals and organizations are learning and doing to live and succeed in our times?

Reinventing Strategic Planning through Forward Design

Each year Signature i has a standing goal to learn or innovate a new methodology, tool or process to renew our practice. In 2011, we tackled a long-standing challenge for our clients—reinventing strategic planning to be a more robust and innovative process.

We merged our love of anticipatory learning with design thinking to craft a new approach we call Forward Design. We took the best of what has always worked with our clients and piloted some new elements with the permission of others who wanted a fresh approach.  Two national associations have now adopted Forward Design and we are now learning, evaluating and revising this new approach in the real world with association executives and volunteer leaders.

Forward Design is a systematic and creative process for exploring an organization’s current and future context, analyzing strategic issues and opportunities and inviting aspirations for design, and then using this learning to inspire innovative design solutions and prototypes for an organization’s future.   

The Forward Design cycle has four phases: exploration of current and future context; analysis and sensemaking; innovation and design; and direction setting.  The sequencing of the tasks can shift around to accommodate the culture, governance structure and schedules inherent in different associations. 

Exploration of Current and Future Context

• Leadership framing—dialogue processes to discover aspirations and assumptions for the profession and association and maybe even challenge those assumptions
• Alternative perspectives—probes for different thinking through dialogue with diverse, external or divergent stakeholders
• Futures research—systematic search for patterns of significant change to forecast future conditions

Analysis & Sense making

• Strategic issues and opportunities—assessment of strategic leadership opportunities for the organization
• Design principles—expression of aspirations and desired outcomes that set the parameters for  what the profession or association should be designed to do
• Change constraints & barriers—pragmatic recognition and acceptance of any limitations that must be addressed through design
• Problem/Opportunity Statement—clarification and agreement on the focus for innovation and planning

Innovation & Design

• Ideation of design solutions—processes to discover and brainstorm  innovative approaches to solve the problem or pursue the opportunity
• Design prototypes—creative images that convey the future direction, structure and capabilities of an organization, program, product or service

Direction Setting

• Desired outcomes—agreement on what an organization, program, product or service must  achieve
• Strategic framework—statement of vision, mission and goals for an organization
• Implementation decisions—next steps to execute the new direction and develop and pilot the prototype

Forward Design may not be right for the association that just needs an efficient way to update a strategic plan and already has volunteers deeply invested in traditional approaches. For those associations that need a way to renew their strategic planning and are completely open to big changes and innovative approaches, Forward Design may be the right mashup of proven practices and innovative thinking you need in 2012.

Planning and Designing in the Visual Age

The National Arts Education Association chose an intensely visual experience for discovering, designing and communicating its new vision and strategic framework.

The leaders of NAEA and Signature i, LLC were studying design thinking and eager to apply its principles to strategic planning.  As advocates and teachers for visual arts education, NAEA members have a natural affinity for design thinking.  Design thinking encourages visual observation, critical thinking to see challenges and solutions clearly, and prototyping ideas and new approaches in creatively concrete ways.

From the beginning the NAEA strategic planning process was a visual experience.  At the annual conference in spring 2010, hundreds of members expressed their ideas and hopes for NAEA in a collaborative art studio.  Working with a team of volunteers and the board, Signature i interpreted this outpouring of opinions and images to discover the association’s strategic issues and opportunities.

We continued this creative expression of NAEA Next when the board convened in its planning retreat several months later.  Every board member did an artistic expression of what NAEA would need to become.  They did this before engaging in more typical processes to draft a vision, mission and goals.

Yes the vision and strategic framework ultimately uses words to convey its intent and message, but the plan’s simple and clear structure can be traced to its visual beginnings.  The words are packed with shared meaning  from exploring and experimenting with the best design for NAEA through visual images.

Design thinking is also evident in how NAEA is communicating its strategic planning process and vision and strategic framework. At the annual conference NAEA distributed a “First Impression” mini-brochure not much bigger than a business card that powerfully unfolds the new plan and shares the journey to create it.

Not every organization is fortunate enough to have artists willing to see the possibilities for a clear and creative design for its future. Still the NAEA experience offers three great practices for others. 

• Invite new ways of expressing ideas and hopes for your organization.
• Think like a designer and see the bold outlines that are essential to your organization’s future.
• Design your communications to deliver both the message of the plan and the experience of creating it.

Three Horizons of Systemic Change

The really big systemic changes play out over decades and can require sustained leadership through three distinct horizons of awareness and action.

In the first horizon, leaders identify the strategic issue and work to create collective awareness of the need to change.  They challenge the assumptions defining the system now, point out the shortcomings, and invoke a vision for a preferred future. They may encourage and sponsor pilot initiatives to probe the potential for this new direction.

In the second horizon, leaders have created some momentum for change and they have the results from their pilot initiatives to guide significant investments in new capabilities and systems infrastructure. For individuals and organizations, this is an intense time of unlearning and relearning to move in this new direction.  This is a time for identifying and inculcating best practices.  

In the third horizon, leaders have achieved the transformation. They are now engaging in continued learning either to improve the new system or to address the unintended consequences that inevitably emerge when a different reality replaces the status quo. They are working to align the culture to sustain this change.

If we can understand systemic change as a slow and sustained process, it can give us the patience and reassurance to keep working for the really big and important changes.  Rather than asking, why are we still talking about this change a decade later, we can instead ask, where are we now in this change?  

For example, in healthcare we have been talking for several decades about the importance of prevention and the need to replace an acute care and chronic disease medical model with a health promotion and prevention model. We have navigated the first horizon and have collective awareness that this is where we need to go. We even have proof of many concepts from a multitude of pilot initiatives. The healthcare reform law is a second horizon move to instill this priority into the system.  Major employers and insurers and public health organizations are doing their part to move more resources into prevention. Prevention is a good example to illustrate the challenges of the third horizon. Without a cultural shift of profound significance and breadth, this will be a difficult transformation.

In the long arc of significant systemic change, leaders have to understand and accept where they are in the horizons of systemic change. This can be part of the story they tell to inspire individuals and organizations not to give up even when the change is decades in the making.