Building Strategic Futures Guide: Environmental Scanning: what it is and how to do it
You can download the guide on environmental scanning which will provide you with detailed steps on how to do environmental scanning in your organisation.
Useful Documents
Some templates and a trend relevance assessment framework that will be useful when you are scanning are available here.
More Resources
See also the Input Methods page in the Resources section, which gives you more information about what scanning is all about.
Please do get in touch with me if you have any questions about doing scanning in your organisation. I am very happy to have a conversation about getting started with scanning.
Want to find out more about how to watch trends and do environmental scanning?
Have a look at trendwatching.com's top 5 trendwatching tips. While Trendwatching's focus is consumer trends, these tips about how to scan are valuable.
Environmental Scanning Thought Leaders
Thinking Futures uses the work of Slaughter, Voros and Hines to inform its environmental scanning approach, which focuses on broad sources (not just newspapers) and awareness of the worldviews of both the scanner and the potential users of scanning output. Key references are:
Richard Slaughter (1999) "A new framework for environmental scanning". Foresight 1 (5): 441-451.
Joseph Voros (2001) "Reframing environmental scanning: an integral approach". Foresight 3 (6): 533-551.
Andy Hines (2003) "Applying integral futures to environmental scanning". Futures Research Quarterly 19 (4) 49-62.
