Summary

The idea behind the guidance within this stage is to create a four way matrix of views of your institution which looks both within the institution and to the forces which are influencing it from outside and to assess these factors both as they exist now and are likely to exist in the future.

If carried out with rigour, honesty and enthusiasm these techniques can provide you with the best possible data from which to frame your strategic decision-making and with which to inform your strategic activity. But accurate and informative data alone does not achieve results or ensure success. All analysis can do is help inform your actions, it cannot carry them out. To achieve this requires the successful management of your strategic activity - which represents the focus of the next stage of this resource.

The institutional experience - Beaumont College

"Reflecting on the infoKit one of the things that struck our Principal was how the need to act quickly had created deficits in processes like environmental scanning (ES) and consultation. The fundamentals of driving activity through strategy have been implemented and understood in varying degrees in different parts of the college organisation - and again using the infoKit brought this to light in a clear way"

Environmental Scanning needs to be focussed

"Our mistake in approaching Environmental Scanning was to start 'too wide' this is being corrected with three 'possible futures' being outlined so that these can be used as a basis for the scenario projection exercise and the resulting Environmental Scanning that will inform risk identification, management of these risks and future planning using informed foresight.

This was probably the most challenging part of the process for the team not because the process was unclear or badly structured simply because of the extraordinary uncertainly in the current circumstances of the college. A very powerful outcome of the work undertaken on ES by the team was the decision taken to pursue scenario planning as an outcome which will at least allow us to attempt some sort of rational codification of the multiple variables in play. We are convinced that we would not have come to that helpful conclusion if it had not been for us working through the infoKit in a structured manner. We also think the attempt to assess risk following an exploration of the underlying values in the organisation is helpful. We think that assessing risk as a first step would be damagingly limiting on the future options available. Spending an adequate amount of time on emphasising what the college does well and what values the college holds in theory and in practice meant that the team was able to estimate risk in a framework of appreciative enquiry.

We think some of the team struggled to translate the data generated by ES into meaningful action. But given the potential for wholesale change in the FE sector this is not surprising."