Let’s ask the crowd
"None of us is as smart as all of us." - Japanese proverb.
A key aspect of developing transformational strategies is understanding the landscape that needs to be traversed by the organization on the way to greater success. Strategic planners develop an environmental scan to identify the external factors that are likely to have a large impact on the organization as it goes down the road. Factors to be considered in an external environmental scan might include but are hardly limited to economic indicators and forecasts, legislative and governmental trends, technological developments, energy and ecological factors, social trends and values, agricultural and food forecasts, labor concerns and trends, transportation forecasts, and much more.
The question arises: Where does one get this information on a timely and comprehensive basis? One source is obvious: Organizations typically look all the time at data that can be instrumental in building the environmental scan. For instance, talking with a potential client earlier this week, a very successful commercial printing company (yes, there are some that are prospering despite the tough economy and move away from ink on paper), the CEO referenced industry data to which they had access that would be very helpful should we move to developing an environmental scan for this organization.
Likewise, experienced planners have favored sources as starting points. Here, gratis, are several resources that we use to gain a thought-provoking global overview of the possible future:
The United Nations Millennium Project
The last link is to a wiki whose premise is that collectively we can pool our knowledge to come up with useful future scenarios. Whether that is effective is unclear, but the Japanese quote at the top of this post suggests it might be useful. (No, don't remind me of lemmings blindly following one another off the edge of the cliff. Let's hope that in this case we are seeing diversity in thinking rather than group think!)
In any case, it seems that crowd sourcing on a less ambitious scale might be very useful when one is trying to develop an environmental scan so that strategies subsequently adopted are more informed and the organization's plan is more resilient than it would be otherwise.
So here's the question, crowd: What are your "go-to" resources when you want to try to gain an understanding of the possibilities of the future for an organization? And, more specifically, how about resources that would be especially applicable to the future for important external factors that are likely to be encountered by high-end sheet-fed printers and packagers? (Fingers crossed that we get the printing company assignment!)
