Environmental Scanning - Thinking Futures

INTERPRETING AND REPORTING YOUR SCANNING
Interpreting Your Trends
You will now have a repository of trends that you and your scanning team think might be important
to your organisation’s future.
The next stage in your scanning process is to interpret your trends, that is, to develop some insights
about those trends to test their relevance for your organisation’s future. This work is best done as a
group by your scanning team. Here you are assessing the relevance/usefulness strength of your
trends for your organisation – what you need to pay attention to now, what you need to watch in
the medium term, and what you need to monitor over the long term.
The Trend Ecosystem
At this stage, it is important to recognise three
things:
• trends don’t exist in isolation,
• trends are extrapolations of the past and the
present, not future facts, and
• trends have uncertain future trajectories.
During this process of interpreting trends, you need to spend some time exploring how the trends
might evolve over time. You should have started to do this when you scanned, and now you are
looking at a number of trends to see how they connect or operate in isolation from each other.
There could be weak or strong connections between trends, and some trends might collide.
Wildcards and other discontinuities might intervene and derail a trend trajectory completely. For
this exercise, you need to be applying system thinking principles.
The further into the future you explore, the more uncertain the trajectory of a trend is, and the
more potential turning points there are. You will need to be exploring multiple alternative pathways
to see whether your view that this trend is important to your organisations is robust across those
alternatives.
Look, in particular, for possible pathways that might have a significant impact on how you do
business today. Ask questions such as:
• what would cause a fundamental change to the way your organisation delivers its services?
• what would generate fundamental change in how your industry is organised?
Remember that you are scanning at the moment, rather than considering strategic options. You are
in the interpretation stage of the Generic Foresight Process (Figure 2) now.
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