Consulting Services
Environmental Scanning

"He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives." – John Boyd, Fighter Pilot, Father of the F-16 and the OODA Loop

Increasing change and uncertainty have fundamentally affected the way we live, work and do business. More than ever, global events and trends have significant effects on local businesses, large or small. Traditional approaches to risk and opportunities have become inadequate leaving businesses exposed to broader more long term and subtle forms of risk. In today’s fast-moving world, where less than half of today’s top performing companies will still be at the top in 10 years time, it is those who are able to anticipate the future through identifying the weak signals of change, the opportunities to innovate and find new markets who will survive.

Environmental scanning is the process used to acquire and use information about events, trends, and relationships in an organisation's external environment to assist management in planning an organisation’s future course of action. Environmental scanning drives an organisation’s strategic planning process – the quality of the planning depends on the quality of the scan.

Research around the world in wide range of industries consistently tells us that over the last 25 years, scanning the environment is associated with high performance largely because identifying threats and opportunities is fundamental to organisations adapting to their challenges.

Strategic Alignment Associates can either:

	Undertake high quality environmental scanning using information from the world’s leading source of scanning data through our alliance with Shaping Tomorrow's, a specialist UK environmental scanning portal, OR;
	Provide your managers with the knowledge, skills, tools and ways of thinking to enable them to scan and analyse their own environmental data, AND;
	Integrate your planning systems with Shaping Tomorrow’s scanning portal which will provide you with your own ‘virtual environmental scanning unit’ and put the full power of broad, over-the-horizon scanning in the hands of your managers

To find out more about how you can significantly enhance your environmental scanning capability and competitive intelligence, contact us at Strategic Alignment.