Facilitating foresight: where the foresight function is placed in organisations

The difficulty faced by all organisations today is how to stay up to date with what is happening in their environment. The velocity of change that organisations face is increasing. The opportunities and threats that arise are dynamic and complex. What is the capability that can assist organisations manage this situation? Richard Slaughter says that the missing capability is foresight. The latter 'is a deliberate process of expanding awareness and understanding through futures scanning and the clarification of emerging situations'. Where, then, is this foresight capability placed in an organisation and how is the process facilitated to achieve that outcome? It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate to practitioners of foresight how environmental intelligence can be facilitated in an organisation to expand awareness and understanding. The principles behind this paper come from a theory of information management, which first came to prominence in the 1970s. Some of the language of that theory may seem difficult and dense to practitioners who encounter it for the first time. While the paper does try to reinterpret that theory to make it relevant to foresight practitioners today, it also wishes to maintain the rigour of the original theory. The benefit to the practitioner who makes the effort to understand the language used will be the acquisition of an expanded vocabulary of rich terminology which can be readily employed in many organisational interventions.