Acting on your Intelligence
Tools and Techniques
The approaches, systems and sources of data outlined in this sections have the potential to provide institutions with an extremely comprehensive corpus of information about their organisation and operating environment. However, having access to such data is only part of the story. Knowledge without appropriate accompanying action will achieve little and the investment made in acccumulating such intelligence will have been wasted.
The challenge is to integrate environment scanning into your strategic and operational decision-making processes and to act on the business intelligence you have access to. This will require an appreciation of risk and its appropriate management and also a commitment to taking an honest, critical look at the role of senior management within the institution, their strengths and weaknesses and their capacity for making effective use of the business intelligence availble to them.
Thankfully, a range of well established techniques exist which can help in this regard, each designed to elicit a particular perspective or view of your institution and the challenges it faces. Crucially, some, such as 5 Whys and Ishikawa or Fishbone Diagrams are designed to look beyond the symptoms of problems and help uncover their root cause.
Others, such as the Boston Matrix, help you to assess your current portfolio of activities and to gain an impression of their status in relation to current market conditions. Such a tool can help you to visualise elements of your institutional activity at any point in time and match this against where you want to be. As such it can play a vital part in informing your decision-making processes when it comes to prioritising strategic activity.
Looking further to the future, Scenario planning or scenario thinking is a strategic planning tool used to make flexible long-term plans. It is a method for learning about the future by understanding the nature and impact of the most uncertain and important driving forces affecting our world.
Many of the regular methods for strategy development assume that the world in three to ten years' time will not significantly differ from that of today and that an organisation will have a large impact on its environment: they assume we can mould the future. Scenario planning however assumes that the future can differ greatly from what we know today.
Comprehensive guidance on undertaking Scenario Planning exercises within your institution is available from our Scenario Planning infoKit
The method is based on creating a series of 'different futures' generated from a combination of known factors, such as demographics, with plausible alternative political, economic, social, technical, legal and environmental (PESTLE) trends which are key driving forces. The goal is to craft diverging worlds by extrapolating these heavily-influencing driving forces. The technique can also include anticipatory thinking elements that are difficult to formalise, such as subjective interpretations of facts, shifts in values, new regulations or inventions.
It is a group process which encourages knowledge exchange and development of mutual deeper understanding of central issues important to the future of your organisation. Although the method is most widely used as a strategic management tool, it can also be used for enabling other types of group discussion about a common future.
The thought processes involved in getting to the scenarios have the dual purpose of increasing knowledge of the environment in which you operate and widening the participant's perception of possible future events - encouraging them to 'think the unthinkable'. For each of these worlds, appropriate action plans can be considered. Asking the key question, 'what do we need to do (now) to be ready for all scenarios?', can then inform the formulation of strategies to cope with these differing pictures of the future (or at least to address the maximum number of possibilities).
