Scanning: Foundation and Practice

Scanning: Foundation and Practice
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Scanning is the foundation for looking into the future. It’s the evidence-gathering process that gives us clues to how the future will play out. It’s our radar system for identifying emerging issues, budding trends, and early signals of factors that will affect the future. It allows us to track development of trends, issues, and challenges already identified. Scanning should be a core competency of any person charged with governance of an organization, charting a strategic course, or top level leadership.

A good scanning system should accomplish the following:
Detect social, political, economic, environmental, scientific, or technological trends and issues that affect the organization.
Define how those trends and other factors will affect the organization, its stakeholders, and customers. They could be threats, opportunities, changes, targets of advocacy, or conditions that call for adaptation.
Promote an ongoing consciousness of what will emerge in the future.
Lead to consideration of implications - the effects, results, consequences, or after-effects of a trend, occurrence, event, or “tipping point.”

Any planning effort should include external and internal analysis of an organization. Scanning is the most basic external analysis. It identifies what is coming so plans can be deal with the future. Scanning allows leaders to anticipate and react. It answers the question, “What is happening?” and “What could happen?” It helps an organization avoid “blind-siding” by something that should not be a surprise.

Here are some basic recommendations of sources and practice as you launch a personal or simple organizational scanning process:

1. Scan a newspaper daily. Recommendation: any U.S. publication over 1 million in circulation - typically this gets you good national/global exposure. I recommend using an online version.

  • USA Today
  • New York Times
  • Los Angeles Times
  • Wall Street Journal*
*My preferred source. I look at the Journal at least once and often multiple times a day. Most of my clients are corporations or trade associations so this is logical for me.

I’m finding that the economic stress and readership trends on many daily publications is profound. For that reason I’ve considered not recommending the LA Times but I’ve worked for the paper when it was under earlier ownership and have a soft spot for what they’re enduring.

2. Scan a newsmagazine weekly. Our recommendations:

  • Economist (best of the pack by far. Written from a global perspective)
  • U.S. News & World Report (probably the least slanted of the alternatives)
  • Time, Newsweek (if you must)

3. Scan a business magazine once per month. Our recommendations:

  • Fortune (neck and neck with Forbes)
  • Forbes (Scan, don't read cover to cover)
  • Business Week (because it’s a weekly it’s a bit more problematic but look at the online version)

4. Once per month scan an eclectic, preferrably future-oriented source. Make it different every month. Here are some examples:

  • Futurist (publication of the World Future Society. Newly improved.)
  • Fast Company (mostly about the future of business and typically quite good)
  • Wired (Sometimes too hip but compelling in its writing and editing. Definitely often on the edge.)
  • Technology Review (MIT-published print and online source that concentrates on cutting-edge technology developments in energy, robotics, genetics, ICT, and materials)
  • New Scientist (almost always a surprise on a given day or something to delve into more deeply)
Many of these sources can be set up for an RSS feed or even Twitter. See below.

5. Cast a wider net by using an ongoing set of online and automated sources to point you to a cross-section of results. Reason: convenience, access from your mobile platform, time savings, customization by keyword, exposure to “weak signals.” Examples:

  • Google News Alerts - hands down the most convenient and best clipping service on the web. You can set up as many “bots” as you want that will identify articles and send you daily or weekly summaries with story links and short descriptions to allow you to move through them quickly. I typically have 5-6 scans going at a time. You might want 1-2.
  • RSS Feeds of your favorite publication. I typically look as much at my Economist RSS feed as I do the printed publication because it saves time and points me at the articles I want to see. But I also look at a hard copy at least once a month.)
  • Blogosphere. There’s a lot of dreck on the ‘Net but there are also several interesting sources where you can see information before it becomes mainstream.
  • Compilations. Some websites do a good job of pulling together a variety of sources in one place for browsing. Yahoo and Google as customized home pages can work this way. Others might range from the Neoconic Drudge to the typically interesting front page of Worio. One of my favorites and highly recommended are the links on The Browser. I use my Twitter feed to alert me to good posts and then head there for drill-downs.
  • Social media. Yes, sometimes it’s a firehose and you don’t want to let it suck time from you but if you’re skillful and prudent about choices even Twitter can supply you with information you would not normally spot. You can see our very basic and occasional tweets here.