Posted by Adam Gordon on Jul 23, 2008 in all, horizon scanning, social change, trend tracking | 0 comments
Being future savvy – developing quality foresight – starts with going out into the world and looking for clues to change. The lingo for this is “horizon scanning,” or “environmental scanning,” and it’s commonly taken to mean looking and listening out beyond our common patch – to the margins where clues to the future may exist currently, in the form of “weak signals”. (It includes embarking on learning journeys, as discussed in the previous post). If we find them and decode them right, that gives us a competitive jump on planning for the future.
The common view of horizon scanning that it is about seeing what’s “out there” in the world. We look for events and signs and changes in behavior or technology and so on, that suggest the beginning of a larger trend. So far, so good. Many institutions, organizations, and companies practice this, or subcontract this service. But – and this is far less commonly practiced or understood – good scanning should focus equally at what’s going on in people’s heads: their ideas, values, and motivations, because these will determine the choices they make, and these choices aggregated over the population and over time will determine the future. (Internal perceptions and external events are linked of course.)
We can’t look into peoples’ heads. But we can look at what is going into their heads: exposing ourselves to the knowledge and ideas people are getting, or choosing. For some analysts this appears a very “low-brow” experience, too insulting of their intelligence to be worth doing. But there can be no adequate future scanning without it.
Fred
I’m prompted into this discussion by a post on the Foresight Culture blog which flags the importance of scanning inputs such as Fred YouTube videos. As posted: “Fred is the YouTube character of a Nebraska teenager, Lucas Cruikshank. I came across his videos because they kept turning up under Most Viewed or Most Popular on Youtube. Most viewed doesn’t make the content of a video valid or even viewable, but in my view, it makes it important to know about. His 19 videos have a combined view total of over 4 million, and Fred’s YouTube channel has 290,762 subscribers, the 4th highest total on YouTube…. Good scanning includes knowing what the mass of people are watching and liking. That means tv shows you might not like or even approve of… The Fred videos are interesting because, even though they are silly satire, they may represent a modern teen’s ideas about life, family, and society.”
View Fred’s video channel
