Some notes from Michele Bowman’s podcast entitled “The Role of Ethnofutures and Environmental Scanning”:
“2 things to keep in mind:
“Any truly useful idea about the futures should first seem to be ridiculous.”: The idea that airplanes would carry people, the fall of the berlin wall, paying bottled water
“not all change is created equal”: The general consensus in the business world is that change happens really, in fact this is not the case at all. There are all sorts of degress of change:
- environmental change, demographic change: takes decade to be felt
- evolutionary change: rising of women in the workforce… incremental… almost predictable timeframe
- faster furious change: the cost of sequencing the genetic alphabet that dropped
Environmental scanning is the understanding the dynamic of change, where and when, how fast? how slow? a collection, interpretation about trends and emerging issues And it needs to be external: “I don’t know who discovered water but it wasn’t a fish” because challenges will come form external environment
Roles of scanning
- as a decision-making capacity
- organizational learning, increasing the sensitivity to change“
Why do I blog this? curiosity towards different methods about foresight research, lots of resonance with the LIFT08 session about this theme.
