Organizing strategic foresight: a contextual practice of ‘way finding’
Dr. David Sarpong
Bristol Business School
University of the West of England
Coldhalrbourlane Bristol BS16 1QY
Professor Mairi Maclean
University of Exeter Business School
University of Exeter
Streatham Court
Rennes Drive
Exeter EX4 4PU
Dr. Elizabeth Alexander
Bristol Business School
University of the West of England
Coldhalrbourlane Bristol BS16 1QY
Published as: Sarpong, D., Maclean, M. & Alexander, E. (2014). Organizing strategic foresight: A contextual practice of ‘way finding. Futures, 53, 33-41.
Abstract
Strategic foresight as a derived outcome of corporate foresight exercises has led to the dominant discourse on strategic foresight as an episodic intervention encompassing a proliferation of organizational foresight methodologies. We argue that such an approach is flawed, consigning strategic foresight to a narrow function in a planning perspective. To move the field into more fertile pastures for research, we draw on the practice theoretical lens to provide an alternative viewpoint on strategic foresight as a bundle of everyday organizing practices.In keeping with the practice approachto strategic foresight, we delineate strategic foresight as a continuous and contextual practice of ‘way-finding’ that manifest in everyday situated organizing.We offer an integrating framework that contributes to the ongoing discussions about alternative approaches to theorizing strategic foresight.
Keywords; Strategic foresight, social practice, episodic intervention
Introduction
In the face of accelerated change and genuine uncertainties in the business environment, strategic foresight has been acknowledged to play a significant role in organizational success and renewal.Current interest in strategic foresight results from two key drivers. First, organizations want to understand the potential implications of new business models and emerging technological trajectories, and overcome the limits on their ability to prepare for the unknown future [1, 2]. Second, empirical evidence suggests strategic foresight could lead to desirable organisational outcomes such as adaptive learning [3], ambidexterity [4], innovation [5, 6], and strategic agility [7].
While the concept of strategic foresight has enjoyed a sustained rise to prominence at the organisational level of analysis [8, 9] it has a long-standing presence in the management and futures literature. However, it suffers from confusion as it isfrequently referred to as a bundle of methodologies, often externally executed upon an organization, through which organizations may garner a broader vision or probe the future to ascertain potential competitive landscapes. Increasinglyaware of the benefit of cultivating strategic foresight,a growing number of organisations support and conduct strategic foresight exercises periodically, but face challenges in integrating strategic foresight into their everyday organisational processes [10, 11, 12]. Simultaneously, strategic foresight is understood not just as a set of processes or tools but as ingrained managerial competencies or capabilities manifest in the fabric of organizational life and upholstered in the ways of knowing and doing in an organization.
Disturbingly, significant obstacles impede or hinder progress in understanding strategic foresight as an organizational capability. For example, scholars have privileged (and promoted) strategic foresight as an episodic intervention for organizations facing strategic difficulties. This dominant discourse is not only unexciting and remote from everyday experiences of those engaged in organizations, but also such a treatise confers legitimacy on a limited connotation that relegates strategic foresight to a set of exercises, frequently facilitated by external consultants, that are linear in nature, cognitivist in emphasis and ultra-rational in form. The consequent outcome of such a legacy is a failure of organizational learning and enactment coupled with a diminution of the importance of strategic foresight. Curiously, despite an increasing interest in the practitioner related aspect of strategic foresight, efforts geared toward a cumulative corpus of the scholarly literature and its theoretical development is still in the pre-paradigmatic stage [13, 14]. In this regard, we risk impoverished theorizing on the creative emergence of strategic foresight and its cultivation in organizations without the help of the empoweringconsultant.
The aim of this paper, therefore, is to explore the potential for understanding strategic foresight as an ongoing internalised social practice in constant flux and transformation that manifests itself in everyday situated organising in place of episodic interventions. The paper attempts to narrow the (widening) epistemic gap between theory and practice of strategic foresight by providing new insight into the management and foresight literature in the following ways: first, while prior research acknowledges foresight as an ongoing process, we delineate strategic foresight as an everyday social practice played out in the day-to-day activities of competent organizational actors as an actualization of a continuous process of becoming [15]. Second, while the thesis advanced in this paper is developed from a theoretical perspective, we move beyond the episodic intervention paradigm topresentstrategic foresight in the form of strategizing as a generative and iterative organizing practice whose coming to presence is internally emergent and negotiated rather than externally brokered.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we explore the theoretical thrust of strategic foresight along with an examination of the traditional conceptualisation of strategic foresight as an episodic intervention. Next, we draw on the ‘practice turn’ in contemporary social theory to ‘unpack’ strategic foresight as an everyday organizing practice. We then go further to delineate how strategic foresight in everyday organizing may manifest itself as an actualization of a continuous and contextual practice of ‘way finding’ into the future . We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of our research.
Issues in strategic foresight
Three distinct problems have emerged in the strategic foresight literature that contribute to fragmentation in the field and for which a unifying theoretical framework is required. First we note a competing-locus dimensionality in attributing the source or level of foresight – individual and organisational. Referring to foresight as a human attribute, Alfred North Whitehead defined it as ‘the ability to see through the apparent confusion, to spot developments before they become trends, to see patterns before they emerge, and to grasp the relevant features of social currents that are likely to shape the direction of future events’ ([16], p. 89). ForSlaughter ([17], p. 1), ‘foresight is not the ability to predict the future.... it is a human attribute that allows us to weigh the pros and cons, to evaluate different courses of action and to invest possible futures on every level with enough reality and meaning to use them as decision making aids’. Conditioned by some of these early definitions, strategic foresight is frequently conceptualised as an individualistic human trait or attribute, and is treated as a managerial function and competence [18, 19] that enables ‘visionary’ managers to ‘penetrate and transgress established boundaries and seize the opportunities otherwise overlooked by others’ ([20], p. 27). By privilegingsuch individuals as the prime locus of strategic foresight such approaches tend to implicitly or explicitly discount the role of other stakeholders in the development and enactment of the future. In contrast, extant research that acknowledges individual heterogeneity, along with thecomplications of attributing strategic foresight to individuals, favours the collective as the source of strategic foresight [21, 22].
Against this background of a contested ontological site, a second problem for the field of strategic foresight concerns a temporal dimension associated with the process of learning – specifically how it accounts for the interception and connection of data dispersed in time into meaningful future-oriented knowledge. From this perspective, strategic foresight becomes a social learning toolthat directs both individual and collective attention to future possibilities and limitations of the present [23-25]. Driven by anticipation, imagination, continuous probing, and the enactment of the future, the focal act of strategic foresight is about interpreting the unknown future as opposed to predicting it [26, 27]. The germane issue here is that strategic foresight in practice plays out as an ‘iterative dance between past experiences, today’s realities and possible trajectories’ ([28], p. 64), narratively linking the past, the present and the future. However, our disposition to treat time as something objective and linear has led to strategic foresight being caricatured as forecasting the future [27, 29], or future oriented studies, that actively confines the development of strong theory to explore strategic foresight as a social learning process that can marry both individual and collective levels of engagement.
A concurrent emphasis on the past, present, and the future, enables and leverages retrospective sense-making promoting a temporal connection and articulation between memory, attention and expectations [30, 31]. Kahneman and Miller ([32], p. 137) put it this way: ‘reasoning flows not only forward from anticipation and hypothesis to confirmation or revision, but also backward, from the experience to what it reminds us of or makes us think about’. The significance of such a ‘time-travel’ perspective is brought into sharp reliefwith Tsoukas and Shepherd’s [33] notion of cultivating organizational foresightfulness in which (i) an excessive emphasis on the past might restrict the ability to spot subtle changes in the present, (ii) an over emphasis on the present might also lead an organization not acting on subtle changes in its environment, while (iii) over-focusing on the future could lead organisations to follow costly fads and fashions which could destroy current competence and capabilities.
While foresight scholars acknowledge the temporal dimension of strategic foresight, it is indicative of the field that research has veered away from the logical outcome of seeking to understand the micro-dimensions of individual and collective thinking and sense-making in preference for the dominant paradigm associated with tools and methods for uncovering strategic foresight. Much of this is associated with the third problem we identify: a widely shared belief that locates strategic foresight as a singular, and often unconnected, component of the planning process, assisting organisations to overcome inertia – i.e. as an episodic exercise that could help organizations broaden their vision, probe the future, and in turn, develop an ability to deal with theaccelerated change and genuine uncertainties characterising their environment.
At the extreme, these exercises are used as an interventionist tool, or a pre-requisite ‘prescription’ for any ‘sick’ organisation attempting to renew itself. A wide range of analytical methodologies have been used to describe these exercises based on the level of participation and reliance on quantitative techniques.Following Fuller and Loogma [34],such methodologies encompass ‘ways of knowing’ that explicitly connote specific assumptions about what constitute strategic foresight such asDelphi iterations [35], business war-gaming [36], scenario planning [37, 38, 39], competitive intelligence [40, 41], peripheral visioning [42, 43] and wild cards and trend extrapolation [44, 45].Scenario planning, in particular, is the most theoretically developed and popular among these foresight methodologies [46, 47] and is replete with multifarious but similar approaches to organizing it in a wide variety of contexts [48, 49]. Both scholars and practitioners have promoted scenario planning exercises within the ‘framework of scientific rationality’ [50], and although scenario planning relies extensively on qualitative tools, cognition and visioning power, as opposed to ‘number crunching’ [46], the practice of scenario planning in its current form is systematic and linear, and often requires facilitation by an external consultant. Hence such methodologies may often appear as an act of imposing a dominant logic on subordinate groups through either truncating alterative scenarios or an ideological understanding of outcomes.
In addition, most organizations are frequently called upon to spontaneously enact foresightful actions within the contingency of the moment given the turbulent environment in which they are embedded. Recognising this salient limit of foresight exercises in general, Burt and Van der Heijden ([51], p. 1020) suggest that scenario planning exercises should be an ‘ongoing way of thinking in the organisation about the future, rather than just an episodic intervention’. Further, in stark opposition to strategic foresight as an episodic process, Tsoukas and Shepherd ([52], p. 10) argue that ‘foresightfulness’ only becomes an organizational skill when future oriented thinking ceases to be undertaken by experts and/or senior managers conducted at set times in order to deal with something called ‘the future’. Elsewhere,Cunha et al. [53] in adopting a critical view on strategic foresight exercises also argue persuasively that the highly uncertain, intensive and competitive environments in which organizations find themselves requires the cultivation of strategic foresight as an ongoing process of staying in tune with their markets rather than as an episodic activity.
Recently, a major advance within the foresight literature has redirected attention to theorising foresight as a social practice to accommodate the advent of novelty, improvisation, and the potential for change arising from ‘foresightful’ actions. This stream of studies ontologically treats strategic foresight as flexible and perpetually becoming [15] and argues that understanding the future requires us to examine everyday organizing practices and micro-interactions between organizational members [53-56].Yet little is known about the creative emergence of strategic foresight from within organizations (rather than being externally directed), consequently we ask how is strategic foresight enacted and reproduced within the everyday practice of organizational actors. Temporally unfolding and permeating organizational life, we argue that practicesare constituted in language,everyday ‘doings’ and ongoing interactions [57, 58], and hence have a genuine epistemological relevance to strategic foresight. We therefore propose to draw on the practice theoretical lens to ‘unpack’ strategic foresight in everyday practice.
Strategic foresight as a social practice
The theory of practice is concerned with the taken-for-granted sense of space and routines of actors as inscribed in the ways they enact their practice(s). It encompasses what Benner [59] (cited in [60], p. 426) describes as a “rich socially embedded…. know-how that encompasses perceptual skills, transitional understandings across time, and understanding of the particular in relation to the general”. In simple terms, it refers to what people do in their situated activities. Practices can therefore be seen as permeating almost every part of social life. For Schatzki ([57], p. 471), they are “organized human activities” made up of “an organized, open-ended spatial-manifold of actions”. Placing emphasis on actors’ actual activities in practice, what those activities are and how these activities are enacted, Schatzki ([61], p. 90) argues that:
“Practices consist of both doings and sayings, suggesting that analysis must be concerned with both practical activity and its representations. Moreover we are given a helpful depiction of the components which form a ‘nexus’, the means through which doings and sayings hang together and can be said to be coordinated”.
Schatzki’s concept of ‘hanging together’, or “held-togetherness” (Zusammenhang) ([61], p. 14), suggests a temporal interrelatedness while activities also serve as a context within which other activities occur. In making sense of ‘social activities’ underpinning the practice of strategic foresight, the everyday activities that actors engage in to fulfil their roles come together to form the nexus of the practice. These activities are not to be understood as mere‘building blocks’ of the practice, enacted just for the sake of the practice; rather, their enactment is goal oriented and based on the experience and intelligibility of actors. The role of intelligibility brings to the fore the role of mental phenomena in practice that Schatzki ([58], p. 49) refers to as desire, hope, fear and anxiety or fundamental “states of affairs” that enable actors to cope with their involvement with the world. As such, and expressed in behaviour, they inform activities by extending understanding and determining what makes sense to people.
In addition to the human dimensions reserved for actors engaged in practice, such as agency, propositional knowledge, skills intertwined with perception, and goals, practice theory also identifiesa role for non-human entities, or artefacts, which by virtue of their mediating roles in practice [62], contribute immensely to the mastering of a practice across space and time. Following Salmon [63], artefacts in practice theory may be understood to comprise linguistic, conceptual, cultural and material entities such as physical tools (e.g. pens, paper etc), technical procedures (e.g. methods for synthesising a chemical) and symbolic resources (e.g. musical notations, chemical formula, logos, natural language etc).
In conceptualising strategic foresight as a socialpractice, it is important to highlight two fundamental assumptions. First, we give ontological priority to organisational members, their artefacts and those regular discernible patterns of activities that take place within the ambit of their praxis.Second, epistemological priority is placed on their quest to understand the future of their complex technologies and business environment and embodies capacities such as know-how and dispositions that are centrally organised around shared skills and practical understandings. Driven by these assumptions, we argue that strategic foresight in practice is neither an attribute nor a trait; rather, it is something that people do [17, 54]. Hence, we define strategic foresight from a practice perspective as the bundles of human actions and organizing practices in context geared towards the creative evaluation and reconfiguration of sources of potentialities into present and future resources and productive outcomes. From this perspective, we argue that strategic foresight is an ongoing social practice enacted on an everyday basis in everyday organizing, sometimes with very little reflection, from an unintended action to an unintended outcome. It continues unabated in as much as relations may remain unexplained even when anomalies are brought within the range of vision. The emergence of strategic foresight in practice is flexible and relational in context.
Transcending the individual subject, the focus for developing a meso-level, integrative theory of strategic foresight should be on discernible coordinated patterns of collective actions and practical activities [61], where primacy is placed not just on consciousness, but also on internalised habits, skills and dispositions as well as reflexive awareness in theorising the reproduction of strategic foresight [64, 65]. However, there may be fundamental concerns here pertaining to which organizing activities constitute strategic foresight in practice. In framing these issues, for a situated activity or praxis to be counted as partly constitutive of strategic foresight, such knowledge based actions, we argue, should: (a) directly or indirectly aim to provide a heuristic interpretation of an anticipated future limits or potentialities; and, (b) directly or indirectly provide some form of descriptive image of a possible, probable and/or desirable organizational outcome.Only in this way can we parse out how organisational actors apply their collective knowledge and capabilities gained from their conscious individual experiences and collective psychic life, in a dynamic, generative way to probe the unknown future.