8/21/2019 Research Tecnology Management - 2010 - The Foresight Process Futures Studies and Scenario Planning http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/research-tecnology-management-2010-the-foresight-process-futures-studies 1/4 Resources and Reviews For Leaders of Technotogical Innovation With this issue we introduce a reimagined nformation Resources. What was a simple list of provocative but unrelated current readings now becomes another durable resource to complement our feature articles and other columns. In this space we II offer a series of primers on key topics with pointers to important resources to keep you informed of new developments and help you expand your repertoire of tools and ideas. In some issues this column will be written by the editors but we welcome your contributions in th e form of suggestions for topics and of column submissions. The Foresight Process Futures Studies aud Scenario Piauuiug In an increasingly dynamic (some would say unstable) global economy, every business decision is a bet on the future. Those bets are even bigger for innovation and R&D managers, whose job it is to single out the products, services, or business models on which the next wave of their company's future will ride. What will consumers want? What will they value? Where will technology go next? What effect will the climate crisis and a growing ecological awareness have on business—on our business? Will the economy stabilize? Or move into some new paradigm? Do we even know what questions to ask? Too often, even when they are based on research, these decisions are made in a moment, based on a decision maker's (often fragmented) understanding of the past and vision of the present. Futures studies, also known as Foresight, offers one way of approaching the problem of th e future (Wikipedia offers reasonably useful summaries of the field under both terms). Broadly speaking, futures studies is exactly what it sounds like: a field dedicated to studying the future. It's not prognostication; rather, futurists work froin a solid understanding of the past and the key forces driving the present to extrapolate to possible futures. The plural is not a typo. Futurists don't predict the ñiture; they explore the range of possible futures. The field emerged as an academic discipline in the 1960s, with the work of people like Hemian Kahn (who assessed the possible outcomes of nuclear war in Thinking about the Unthinkable and predicted the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s in The Coming Boom: Economic Political and Social [New York: Horizon, 1982]) and Wendell Bell, whose two-volume Foundations of Future Studies: Human Science for a New Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997) offers a comprehensive survey of th e foundation and intellectual framework of the field. Pierre Wack brought Herman Kahn's thinking into the business world with his work at Royal Dutch Shell in the 1960s and early 1970s, when he foresaw the possibility of a severe oil shock— allowing Shell executives to respond appropriately when the shocks arrived. Wack documents his experience at Shell and offers insight into his process in a two-part Harvard Business Review article, The Gentle Art of Reperceiving (part one appeared as Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead, Sept.-Oct. 1985, and part two as Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids, Nov.-Dec. 1985). Kahn and Wack focused on a particular tool of futures studies, scenario planning. Scenario planning involves identifying the major forces in play in the environment and projecting how September— October 2 1 changes in those forces will affect other elements to produce a particular future. The result is a range of possibilities, each accompanied by a vivid description of the future produced by each set of possible factors. The point, as Wack puts it, is not so much to have one scenario that 'gets it right' as to have a set of scenarios that illuminates the major forces driving the system, their interrelationships, and the critical uncertainties ( Shooting the Rapids 146 . But foresight is a process, not a product. In order to benefit from scenarios and scenario planning, company leaders must be willing to engage in a strategic conversation that encompasses the entire foresight process, from identifying the focus question for the process through to integrating the insight gained back into business strategy and operations. As Ari de Geus argues in The Living Company (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 1997), the sensitivity to environmental forces and the willingness to engage change that both drive and emerge from the foresight process are key attributes of companies that survive. For de Geus, the living company is a learning company—de Geus pioneered the term learning organization —one that goes beyond forecasting the future to learning from and preparing for it. De Geus worked with Pierre Wack in Shell's Strategic Planning Group, as did Peter Schwartz. Schwartz's The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain orld (New York: Currency-Doubleday, 1991; rptd. with additional material 1996) offers an overview of the scenario planning process. Although—as some Amazon reviewers have pointed out—Schwartz's predictions for 2005 aren't exactly on point, the real value of Schwartz's book is in the careful overview of scenario planning and in the idea that scenario planning can go beyond illuminating the future; rather, Schwartz argues, exploring the future can reveal the blind spots in managers' vision of today. In Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (New York: Wiley, 1996), Kees van der Heijden offers a wide-ranging overview of the scenario process. The strategic conversation, for van der
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8/21/2019 Research Tecnology Management - 2010 - The Foresight Process Futures Studies and Scenario Planning