Strategic Foresight

Welcome to the SIG

Sig Chair George Burt

Sig Chair Swapnesh Masrani

Sig Chair Efstathios Tapinos

The SIG focuses on developing greater understanding on Strategic Foresight (SF) in organisation’s day to day activities and long term strategies. SF is our capacity for probing the future. It is the ability to understand complexity and accurately interpret how the driving forces in organizational environments may result in unpredictable, uncertain and surprising futures. Who would have thought, for instance, about digital music and its implications for the music industry until Apple gave us the iPod just a few decades ago? Now consider the medium to long term implications of such developments as bio-technology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and the growing economic clout of Brazil, Russia, India and China just to name a few.

‘If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable’ (SENECA 4BCE - 65CE)

The trends driving the future and their interaction result in organizational environments characterized by complexity. They have the potential to profoundly affect a wide range of industries in terms of threatening existing markets and organizational competencies, capabilities and processes, as well as creating new opportunities. In organisational environments characterized by complexity, medium to long term predictions become less reliable strategic planning processes and other techniques and reasoning must be employed to understand these complex organisational environments. This poses a challenge for both practicing managers and academic scholars attempting to make sense of these quickly changing environments and how organizations respond strategically to them. Developing deeper understanding of these issues becomes very important. Greater understanding requires multi-disciplinary approaches and greater plurality in both empirical and theoretical research.
 

The SIG’s interest can be categorised under two areas

a) Developing strategic foresight and
b) Exploring SF's relation with specific organisational practices and processes.
 

Specific issues under these themes include

• Issues related to managerial perception, peripheral vision, prospective sense making.
• Organizational learning (and un-learning).
• Complexity and SF.
• Prospects and problems associated with tools and techniques for developing alternative futures (e.g. scenario thinking).
• Role of History, for example, the role of path-dependency and hindsight (e.g. counterfactual analysis).
• Influence of SF on the day to day judgments in decision making and routines.
• Role of SF in developing capabilities for future.
• Risk (e.g. management of risk in developing future capabilities).
• Role of SF in fostering innovation.
• Role of SF in organizational change process. For example, in diagnosing decline and initiating renewal.
• Exploring the tensions between individual versus organizational foresight.
• SF and emergent versus deliberate approaches to strategy formulation.
• Issues related to the enactment of SF.
   

Clearly, the SIG does not limit itself to these themes, but is open to new issues as they emerge over time. What we are particularly seeking to encourage in this track is an element of speculative fervour that can help inject a certain freshness of thought into strategy scholarship. To be practically useful management scholarship must act as a vehicle of renewal; to help re-educate attention and to expand the horizons of understanding within the world of practice. We would welcome your engagement to expand our understanding of strategic foresight in the 21st century.