Foresight for Dynamic Organisations in Unstable Environments

A Search for New Frameworks

Sandro Mendonça, Bartolomeo Sapio

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415672238
• eBook ISBN: 9781317979517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Foresight has an especially important role in times of transition and trouble. In times of turbulence foresight arises as a tool for intellectual freedom and enhanced strategic leverage. But foresight itself is always in a continuing process of innovation as it is not detached from the changing environment that engulfs organisations. Taking stock from innovative developments in foresight methodologies and implementation experiences is relevant as new experiments have rapidly accumulated in this new century. Looking ahead calls for a review of new perspectives and recent practice on foresight methodology and on how foresight is embedded in organisations.

This book brings together a sample of real-world cases and of conceptual proposals bridging between practitioners and researchers in the field of futures research. Such an ambition is an increasingly difficult balancing act as the gap between the needs of organisational leaders and the incentives of academics becomes an ever widening gulf due to increasingly specialised and self-absorbed agendas. To further this book's goals we had the opportunity to assemble an international team of authors coming from a variety of backgrounds to provide their first-hand view from the frontier of new foresight empirical work and theoretical reflection.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.

Introduction: new perspectives and practices for managing foresight in changing organisational settings

Foresight in times of transition and trouble

In times characterised by a tyranny of turbulence foresight arises as a tool for intellectual freedom and enhanced strategic leverage, but, it should be noted, foresight itself is always in a continuing state of experimentation as it is not detached from the changing environment that engulfs organisations. Taking stock from developments in foresight methodologies and implementation experiences is especially important at this moment as the first decade of the present century draws to a close. Looking ahead calls for a review of new perspectives and recent practice on foresight methodology and on how foresight is embedded in organisations.

It might be argued that foresight is needed the most in circumstances in which uncertainty is the most severe and we believe that these are times in which foresight experts and practitioners should rise to the call. The few years into the twentieth-first century have, so far, only heightened a profound sense of immersion into the unthinkable. Citizens, communities and governments have been caught between the shock of dramatic discontinuities and the pressure of powerful long-term trends.

On the one hand, the stability of existing socio-economic structures has been violently pierced by events such as the epoch-defining terrorist attacks on American soil, the onslaught of major natural accidents like the Indian Ocean tsunami and hurricane Katrina, or a financial crisis in Wall Street which morphed into a sharp global economic downturn (variously described as an ‘economic Pearl Harbour’ and ‘once-in-a century credit tsunami’ by personalities such as legendary investor Warren Buffett and former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, respectively). On the other hand, the gradual development of trajectories in areas such as climate change, trade globalisation, income inequality, scientific acceleration, technological transition into a networked knowledge economy and the redistribution of geo-political protagonism to emerging powers such as China, Russia and India. Such trends have, slowly but steadily, bitten into the sustainability of old assumptions and perceived options in fields ranging from energy security, through food policy, to peace-building.

The exposure to uncontrollable change taking place — but at different speeds contemporaneously — in a great diversity of dimensions, and met with different levels of surprise by different actors and stakeholders, creates the potential for alarmist responses that undercut each other at several levels leaving no single agenda contradiction-free. Quick twists and turns in trends invite decision-makers to respond in adaptive, improvised ways, but at the risk of intertemporal inconsistency. In highly volatile systems moments presenting wholly unique threats and extraordinary opportunities succeed each other at a higher speed than individuals can assimilate, let alone filter and assess them. Constant change may be disarming and demobilising, but it also brings about an excess of half-baked advice. The persistence of turmoil also puts a premium on order; hence, the perpetually renewed proclamation of new ‘game-changing’ ideas in airport bookshop shelves and the recourse to history as treasure-chest of anecdotes and hints for the future in newspaper columns. Insurance against turbulence, and its traps, is on demand.

In such an environment shaken by incessant, fast-paced change foresight provides a sort of epistemic ballast to organisations. Foresight cushions attention-strapped organisations when in critical times short-run decisions have a critical bearing on long-term performance. Foresight can mediate the everyday interaction of social groups with topics that have a strategic bearing on the future of the economy and the ecosystem, thereby shaping perceptions and practices. In this way foresight can help to integrate heterogeneous and competing agendas, and introduce some degree of dynamic coherence into debates over policy and strategy.

We take foresight to be a deliberate, critical, reflexive and creative forward-looking engagement with future, action-dependent states of affairs. It distinguishes itself from utopia by the consideration of multiple future possibilities and the weight given to possible dystopian outcomes of evolution; it distinguishes itself from fortune-telling by the use of explicit methodologies open to criticism and improvement; it distinguishes itself from forecasting by admitting qualitative techniques and by not giving a misleading appearance of neutrality regarding the qualities (i.e. desirability) of future outcomes. Foresight is about relentless assumption questioning and about the transformation of the parameters that make us understand the future. It is mostly about discovering new options, not so much predicting by extrapolating past routines. Foresight can thus be defined as a research-based activity that draws on a wide array of disciplines and insights in order to build anticipatory and actionable knowledge useful for stakeholders and decision-makers.

Private and public organisations are still a prominent mode of coordinating collective human action in spite of the growth of peer-to-peer, digitally-empowered and mass distributed work in open social and business webs. From this perspective it is of particular interest, both theoretical and practical, to understand the new and evolving ways in which the systematic exploration of the future is being organised. Organisations are situated in dynamic and unpredictable environments, so they have to be innovative and resourceful. The new ways in which foresight is becoming embedded and managed in organisations constitutes the prime focus of this special issue.

A portfolio of foresight perspectives and practices

In today’s globalised and technology-rich economy pursuing long-run sustainable routes that are robust enough to withstand short-run disruptions is a restless process that continuously mixes reflection and action. To further this special issue’s goals we had the opportunity to assemble an international team of authors coming from a variety of backgrounds. This special issue brings together a sample of real-world experiments and of conceptual proposals designed to bridge between practitioners and researchers in the field of foresight. Such an ambition is an increasingly difficult balancing act as the gap between the needs of organisational leaders and the incentives of academics becomes an ever widening gulf as a result of increasingly specialised and self-absorbed agendas.

Jan Schwartz presents ‘business wargaming’, a simulation technique that can be implemented to make several teams within a given company more aware of their own interacting dynamics, of their competitors and the market. Lessons learned in this safe environment are of value to different organisational stakeholders, including top managers, workers and mid-level team leaders, who have to become more and more multifunctional to deal with complex business missions in which tolerance for error is declining. In his pioneering contribution Schwartz articulates how ‘business wargaming’ can become a tool in the arsenal of strategic foresight.

Pierre Rossel’s paper refers to the role of weak signal analysis as a broad canvas in which organisational stakeholders can appraise and re-appraise strategising hypotheses in rugged decision-making environments. Rossel deals with the issues of examination of potential seeds of future change by directly confronting the question that pattern-recognition and pattern-projection may be indistinguishable in real time, that is, that observing reality and constructing it overlap. To capitalise on the paradox Rossel tackles a number of metaphors in the literature and advances the debate by introducing the twin notions of flexible framing and meta-framing as a conceptual matrix in which pattern identification efforts can take place in analytically reflexive conditions.

Sébastien Treyer’s reflection starts out by a clear and simple, but often dismissed, premise; that foresight projects are typically initiated in already existing strategic conversations. Foresight projects are no mere one-off operations; they are exercises that play at the same time with old and new elements.An implication is that the effectiveness of foresight capabilities within organisations is partly a function of the success in both re-parameterising the representations of the future while keeping a link to past references that allow a community of participants to accumulate insights and knowledge. This conceptual framework allows us to stretch current best practice in foresight by providing a ground on which to erect criteria for quality evaluation of foresight interventions, to use the author’s apt terminology.

The paper by Patrick van der Duin and Eric den Hartigh examines the tension between the technological innovation process and the strategic formulation process. Their argument is that foresight serves as a weight/counter-weight system between processes that are designed to open up options (innovation) and close down alternatives (strategy). The authors articulate their view on how foresight research interplays with innovation management and strategy making on the basis of a survey of multi-national companies. In their words, foresight as an integrative tool in the ‘battle for the future’ has different uses in different theatres of operations. A framework that combines stability vs dynamism of the internal and external environment of business firms is used to qualify the role of foresight in a setting of four ideal-type situations.

Michael Sørgaard Jørgensen and Ulrik Jørgensen tell the story of a ‘green’ foresight project initiated by a Danish public organisation. In doing so their paper sheds light into how prospective environmental opportunities and threats can be managed in a way that takes into account the necessary contestability of possible social and technical solutions that may emerge as priorities. The discursive approach that Jørgensen and Jørgensen describe constitutes a model of how the complex relationship between social visions and technological options may be at the same time problematised and, simultaneously, held out as an opener of innovative policy pathways that were not predicted by stakeholders.

Gianluca Misuraca’s paper charts the course from the reality of e-Government of first generation (‘e-Gov 1.0’) to the rhetoric of ‘e-Gov 2.0’. On this dynamic background the author discusses the future promises of m-Government. The paper further addresses the various emerging scenarios and how they can be used in a policy relevant way, suggesting that m-Government appears to be a promising area for research and experimentation, opening new possibilities for delocalised governmental servicing and user involvement.

The team of authors headed by Totti Könnölä offers an analysis of what may be termed ‘modular’ foresight projects at a leading contract research organisation, the VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland. What marks the VTT case out is the huge variety of foresight projects managed and the variegated range of foresight expertise involved. This team of authors offers an account of how it is possible to make sense of a widening array of exercises by developing a framework for the integrated management of the different kinds of foresight activities. Modular process design arises as a sensible option to minimise the cost of running such activities while taking advantage of the cross-fertilisation potential of available expertise.

Attila Havas focuses on a long-established institution, the University, and discusses how novel methods are needed to shape the future of the higher education system. Havas suggests multi-level ‘cascading’ futures framework as key trends and driving forces are international in their nature and universities are embedded in broader stakeholder systems. What is proposed is multi-level foresight as a way to appraise desired and feasible future states and, more broadly, as a source of higher education renewal.

This special issue grew out of the final conference of COST A22 network entitled ‘From Oracles to Dialogue: Exploring New Ways to Explore the Future’, held at the National Technical University, Athens, Greece, 9–11 July 2007.

Acknowledgements

A number of researchers and practitioners contributed to the collective effort of reviewing the papers. We greatly appreciate the contribution of Alexandre Abreu, Anders Koed Madsen, Andrea Pannone, Andreas Graefe, António Ioris, Barend van der Meulen, Christof Weinhardt, Cristiano Cagnin, Eugene Loos, Jan Schwartz, Jon Mikel Zabala Iturriagagoitia, Jonathan Snapsed, Jorge Vieira, José Luís de Almeida e Silva, Magnus Gulbrandsen, Miguel Lopes, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Olivier da Costa, Patrícia Palma, Patrick Law, Pedro Puga, Peter Hall, Pierre Rossel, Roberto Poli, Serge Stalpers, Simone Arnaldi, Tiago Mata, Tomaz Turk and Totti Könnölä. This special issue also owes to the encouragement and editorial support of Harry Rothman and Sean Rothman.

Business wargaming: developing foresight within a strategic simulation

Jan Oliver Schwarz
Berlin University of the Arts, Germany

The development of foresight is a crucial activity for any organisation, especially in times of increasing dynamism and complexity. The aim of this article is to discuss the usefulness of developing foresight in a business wargame. Wargaming, a role-playing simulation of a dynamic situation, has been used mainly by the military, but more recently, it has also been used in the context of competitive intelligence and strategy-testing in organisations. A business wargame typically evolves several years into the future, allowing the participants to ‘experience’ future dynamics in the organisational environment and, consequently, to develop foresight. This article argues that, because of its participative and dynamic nature, business wargaming can overcome cognitive barriers, challenge mental models, detect weak signals of change in an organisational environment, re-direct attention in an organisation, and assist an organisation in developing foresight.

1. Introduction

Organisations are confronted with a more complex and dynamic environment than ever, one that is characterised by discontinuities and an uncertain future. This condition is likely not only to continue but to intensify. The major tasks for today’s managers are to make decisions, formulate strategies, and implement strategic management systems; however, in such an environment, the imperative of ‘predict and prepare’, the foundation of the neoclassical school of management (Gharajedaghi 1999), is no longer appropriate. Corporations are now being urged to develop foresight (Hamel and Prahald 1994; Courtney 2001), to prepare for the future, not just to predict it. In addition, several governments have already engaged in national foresight activities, a trend that is also likely to accelerate (Martin and Johnson 1999).

In practise, the dominant question for organisations remains, how to develop and implement foresight processes. While the scenario technique has been praised as valuable in developing foresight, numerous barriers, especially cognitive ones, exist (De Geus 1997; Bazerman and Watkins 2004; Day and Schoemaker 2004; MacKay and McKiernan 2004; Seidl and Van Aaken 2004); these cognitive barriers tend to hinder foresight (Schwarz 2005).

The primary aim of this article is to examine how business wargaming could contribute to developing foresight and to reducing the organisational barriers to developing foresight. Business wargaming has been applied for several centuries to the military field and since the late 1980s management has used it for instance to test strategies. In short, a business wargame is a role-playing simulation of a dynamic business situation (Kurtz 2003).

The article is organised as follows: first, the role and the importance of developing foresight will be discussed; second, the scenario technique will be critiqued and the cognitive barriers to developing foresight will be discussed; third, the method of business wargaming will be introduced; and fourth, the advantages of business wargaming and its role in the foresight process will be explored.

2. Developing foresight

As early as 1931, Alfred North Whitehead, in a celebrated lecture at the Harvard Business School, identified foresight as the crucial feature of the competent business mind (Tsoukas 2004). Since the late 1980s, foresight has been used to describe activities that inform decision-makers, by providing input concerning the long-term future (Miles, Keenan, and Kaivo-Oja 2003). However, the term is often used interchangeably with terms such as futures studies and prospective analysis, so there is little consensus on the boundaries between these fields.

Makridakis (2004, XIII) states that the role of foresight is ‘to provide business executives and government policy makers with ways of seeing the future with different eyes and fully understanding the possible implications of alternative technological/societal paths’. Foresight involves spotting developments before they become trends, seeing patterns before they fully emerge, and grasping the relevant features of social currents that are likely to have an impact (Tsoukas 2004), rather than making predictions. Ideally, foresight recognises even faint signals of change or trends in the corporate business environment and imagines alternative pictures and how organisations will evolve as a part of these pictures.

As a process in an organisational context, foresight is based on the principle that discontinuities (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: new perspectives and practices for managing foresight in changing organisational settings
• 2. Business wargaming: developing foresight within a strategic simulation
• 3. Weak signals as a flexible framing space for enhanced management and decision-making
• 4. Exploring the weak signals of starts-ups as a folksonomic system
• 5. Keeping the balance: exploring the link of futures research with innovation and strategy processes
• 6. Changing perspectives on foresight and strategy: from foresight project management to the management of change in collective strategic elaboration processes
• 7. Green technology foresight of high technology: a social shaping of technology approach to the analysis of hopes and hypes
• 8. Management of foresight portfolio: analysis of modular foresight projects at contract research organisation
• 9. e-Government 2015: exploring m-government scenarios, between ICT-driven experiments and citizen-centric implications
• 10. Universities and the emerging new players: building futures for higher education
• Index