Attention and foresight in organizations

Abstract

The challenges of dealing with the future include its vast scope, in time and breadth, as well as its deep uncertainty. In an age when organizational attention is increasingly limited, deciding how much to focus on the future is a central leadership challenge. At one extreme, a firm can devote massive efforts to rigorous analyses of trends and uncertainties to narrow the range of possible outcomes; at the other, it can do very little of this, wait to see what happens, and then improvise as needed. A wide range of postures exists between these two extremes, reflecting the complexity of issues involved, the firm's strategy plus the costs and benefits of a focus on the future versus the present.

Corporate foresight as a microfoundation of dynamic capabilities

“…One key insight is the importance of training managers (Battistella, ). In particular, the results emphasize the need to (a) train in reserving and directing attention toward the periphery and the mid‐ to long term (Schoemaker, ); (b) train in decision‐making under uncertainty (Courtney, Kirkland & Viguerie, ); and (c) train in reconfiguring resources, a skill also emphasized via the increasing interest in using a business model language to allow firms to survive transitions (Bidmon & Knab, ; Teece, ; Teece, Peteraf & Leih, ). In addition, this resonates with Vogel and Güttel (), who argued on the basis of bibliometric research that two important topics in the research on dynamic capabilities are missing: leadership and human resources.…”

Scenario planning as a strategy process to foster supply chain adaptability: theoretical framework and longitudinal case

“…Scenarios can bring to managers' attention their constituent driving forces shaping the business environment (Schoemaker, 2019). This can broaden a manager's "situated attention" (Ocasio, 1997) to cover relevant aspects of the business environment that may be overlooked in the pursuit of operational responsibilities focused on the issues internal to the supply chain.…”

“…Scenarios, describing driving forces of the slow-changing phenomena, can bring this information to the attention of operational managers bombarded with temporally incongruent fast-paced, operational issues. This can help operational managers detect the related slow-changing phenomena, by activating their absorptive capacity to notice and make sense of new information (Schoemaker, 2019). As absorptive capacity is "largely a function of the firm's level of prior related knowledge" (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990, p. 128), changes in the driving forces contained in the scenarios used by the managers are more likely to be noticed and interpreted as relevant.…”

“…This study expounds scenario planning as a mechanism to influence organizational attention, as being recognized by scenario planning scholars (Schoemaker, 2019;Vecchiato, 2019), to alleviate shorttermism. This perspective presents several opportunities for future scholarship.…”

Surviving and prospering in challenging business environments

“…Prior research has claimed that scenario analysis is able, therefore, to broaden the range of possible futures considered, to challenge existing mental frames about the future environment, and to direct thinking towards aspects that otherwise would be neglected. Consequently, novel and valuable strategic options that could support a firm in preparing for the future in dynamic environments are generated (Grant, 2003;Schoemaker, 1995Schoemaker, , 2019Wack, 1985). In line with the reasoning advanced by March (2006), scenario analysis may provide the level of variation and experimentation needed by firms to survive and prosper when uncertainty is high.…”