Organizing strategic foresight: a contextual practice of ‘way finding’

Dr. David SarpongBristol Business School

University of the West of EnglandColdhalrbourlane Bristol BS16 1QY

Professor Mairi MacleanUniversity of Exeter Business School

University of Exeter Streatham Court

Rennes DriveExeter EX4 4PU

Dr. Elizabeth AlexanderBristol Business School

University of the West of EnglandColdhalrbourlane Bristol BS16 1QY

Published as: Sarpong, D., Maclean, M. & Alexander, E. (2014). Organizing strategic foresight: A contextual practice of ‘way finding. Futures, 53, 33-41.

AbstractStrategic foresight as a derived outcome of corporate foresight exercises has led to the dominant discourse on strategic foresight as an episodic intervention encompassing a proliferation of organizational foresight methodologies. We argue that such an approach is flawed, consigning strategic foresight to a narrow function in a planning perspective. To move the field into more fertile pastures for research, we draw on the practice theoretical lens to provide an alternative viewpoint on strategic foresight as a bundle of everyday organizing practices. In keeping with the practice approach to strategic foresight, we delineate strategic foresight as a continuous and contextual practice of ‘way-finding’ that manifest in everyday situated organizing. We offer an integrating framework that contributes to the ongoing discussions about alternative approaches to theorizing strategic foresight.

Keywords; Strategic foresight, social practice, episodic intervention

Introduction

In the face of accelerated change and genuine uncertainties in the

business environment, strategic foresight has been acknowledged to play

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a significant role in organizational success and renewal. Current interest

in strategic foresight results from two key drivers. First, organizations

want to understand the potential implications of new business models

and emerging technological trajectories, and overcome the limits on their

ability to prepare for the unknown future [1, 2]. Second, empirical

evidence suggests strategic foresight could lead to desirable

organisational outcomes such as adaptive learning [3], ambidexterity [4],

innovation [5, 6], and strategic agility [7].

While the concept of strategic foresight has enjoyed a sustained

rise to prominence at the organisational level of analysis [8, 9] it has a

long-standing presence in the management and futures literature.

However, it suffers from confusion as it is frequently referred to as a

bundle of methodologies, often externally executed upon an organization,

through which organizations may garner a broader vision or probe the

future to ascertain potential competitive landscapes. Increasingly aware

of the benefit of cultivating strategic foresight, a growing number of

organisations support and conduct strategic foresight exercises

periodically, but face challenges in integrating strategic foresight into

their everyday organisational processes [10, 11, 12]. Simultaneously,

strategic foresight is understood not just as a set of processes or tools

but as ingrained managerial competencies or capabilities manifest in the

fabric of organizational life and upholstered in the ways of knowing and

doing in an organization.

Disturbingly, significant obstacles impede or hinder progress in

understanding strategic foresight as an organizational capability. For

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example, scholars have privileged (and promoted) strategic foresight as

an episodic intervention for organizations facing strategic difficulties.

This dominant discourse is not only unexciting and remote from everyday

experiences of those engaged in organizations, but also such a treatise

confers legitimacy on a limited connotation that relegates strategic

foresight to a set of exercises, frequently facilitated by external

consultants, that are linear in nature, cognitivist in emphasis and ultra-

rational in form. The consequent outcome of such a legacy is a failure of

organizational learning and enactment coupled with a diminution of the

importance of strategic foresight. Curiously, despite an increasing

interest in the practitioner related aspect of strategic foresight, efforts

geared toward a cumulative corpus of the scholarly literature and its

theoretical development is still in the pre-paradigmatic stage [13, 14]. In

this regard, we risk impoverished theorizing on the creative emergence

of strategic foresight and its cultivation in organizations without the help

of the empowering consultant.

The aim of this paper, therefore, is to explore the potential for

understanding strategic foresight as an ongoing internalised social

practice in constant flux and transformation that manifests itself in

everyday situated organising in place of episodic interventions. The

paper attempts to narrow the (widening) epistemic gap between theory

and practice of strategic foresight by providing new insight into the

management and foresight literature in the following ways: first, while

prior research acknowledges foresight as an ongoing process, we

delineate strategic foresight as an everyday social practice played out in

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the day-to-day activities of competent organizational actors as an

actualization of a continuous process of becoming [15]. Second, while the

thesis advanced in this paper is developed from a theoretical perspective,

we move beyond the episodic intervention paradigm to present strategic

foresight in the form of strategizing as a generative and iterative

organizing practice whose coming to presence is internally emergent and

negotiated rather than externally brokered.

The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we explore

the theoretical thrust of strategic foresight along with an examination of

the traditional conceptualisation of strategic foresight as an episodic

intervention. Next, we draw on the ‘practice turn’ in contemporary social

theory to ‘unpack’ strategic foresight as an everyday organizing practice.

We then go further to delineate how strategic foresight in everyday

organizing may manifest itself as an actualization of a continuous and

contextual practice of ‘way finding’ into the future . We conclude the

paper with a discussion of the implications of our research.

Issues in strategic foresight

Three distinct problems have emerged in the strategic foresight

literature that contribute to fragmentation in the field and for which a

unifying theoretical framework is required. First we note a competing-

locus dimensionality in attributing the source or level of foresight –

individual and organisational. Referring to foresight as a human

attribute, Alfred North Whitehead defined it as ‘the ability to see through

the apparent confusion, to spot developments before they become trends,

to see patterns before they emerge, and to grasp the relevant features of

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social currents that are likely to shape the direction of future events’

([16], p. 89). For Slaughter ([17], p. 1), ‘foresight is not the ability to

predict the future.... it is a human attribute that allows us to weigh the

pros and cons, to evaluate different courses of action and to invest

possible futures on every level with enough reality and meaning to use

them as decision making aids’. Conditioned by some of these early

definitions, strategic foresight is frequently conceptualised as an

individualistic human trait or attribute, and is treated as a managerial

function and competence [18, 19] that enables ‘visionary’ managers to

‘penetrate and transgress established boundaries and seize the

opportunities otherwise overlooked by others’ ([20], p. 27). By privileging

such individuals as the prime locus of strategic foresight such

approaches tend to implicitly or explicitly discount the role of other

stakeholders in the development and enactment of the future. In

contrast, extant research that acknowledges individual heterogeneity,

along with the complications of attributing strategic foresight to

individuals, favours the collective as the source of strategic foresight [21,

22].

Against this background of a contested ontological site, a second

problem for the field of strategic foresight concerns a temporal

dimension associated with the process of learning – specifically how it

accounts for the interception and connection of data dispersed in time

into meaningful future-oriented knowledge. From this perspective,

strategic foresight becomes a social learning tool that directs both

individual and collective attention to future possibilities and limitations of

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the present [23-25]. Driven by anticipation, imagination, continuous

probing, and the enactment of the future, the focal act of strategic

foresight is about interpreting the unknown future as opposed to

predicting it [26, 27]. The germane issue here is that strategic foresight

in practice plays out as an ‘iterative dance between past experiences,

today’s realities and possible trajectories’ ([28], p. 64), narratively linking

the past, the present and the future. However, our disposition to treat

time as something objective and linear has led to strategic foresight

being caricatured as forecasting the future [27, 29], or future oriented

studies, that actively confines the development of strong theory to

explore strategic foresight as a social learning process that can marry

both individual and collective levels of engagement.

A concurrent emphasis on the past, present, and the future,

enables and leverages retrospective sense-making promoting a temporal

connection and articulation between memory, attention and expectations

[30, 31]. Kahneman and Miller ([32], p. 137) put it this way: ‘reasoning

flows not only forward from anticipation and hypothesis to confirmation

or revision, but also backward, from the experience to what it reminds us

of or makes us think about’. The significance of such a ‘time-travel’

perspective is brought into sharp relief with Tsoukas and Shepherd’s [33]

notion of cultivating organizational foresightfulness in which (i) an

excessive emphasis on the past might restrict the ability to spot subtle

changes in the present, (ii) an over emphasis on the present might also

lead an organization not acting on subtle changes in its environment,

while (iii) over-focusing on the future could lead organisations to follow

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costly fads and fashions which could destroy current competence and

capabilities.

While foresight scholars acknowledge the temporal dimension of

strategic foresight, it is indicative of the field that research has veered

away from the logical outcome of seeking to understand the micro-

dimensions of individual and collective thinking and sense-making in

preference for the dominant paradigm associated with tools and methods

for uncovering strategic foresight. Much of this is associated with the

third problem we identify: a widely shared belief that locates strategic

foresight as a singular, and often unconnected, component of the

planning process, assisting organisations to overcome inertia – i.e. as an

episodic exercise that could help organizations broaden their vision,

probe the future, and in turn, develop an ability to deal with the

accelerated change and genuine uncertainties characterising their

environment.

At the extreme, these exercises are used as an interventionist tool,

or a pre-requisite ‘prescription’ for any ‘sick’ organisation attempting to

renew itself. A wide range of analytical methodologies have been used to

describe these exercises based on the level of participation and reliance

on quantitative techniques. Following Fuller and Loogma [34], such

methodologies encompass ‘ways of knowing’ that explicitly connote

specific assumptions about what constitute strategic foresight such as

Delphi iterations [35], business war-gaming [36], scenario planning [37,

38, 39], competitive intelligence [40, 41], peripheral visioning [42, 43]

and wild cards and trend extrapolation [44, 45]. Scenario planning, in

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particular, is the most theoretically developed and popular among these

foresight methodologies [46, 47] and is replete with multifarious but

similar approaches to organizing it in a wide variety of contexts [48, 49].

Both scholars and practitioners have promoted scenario planning

exercises within the ‘framework of scientific rationality’ [50], and

although scenario planning relies extensively on qualitative tools,

cognition and visioning power, as opposed to ‘number crunching’ [46],

the practice of scenario planning in its current form is systematic and

linear, and often requires facilitation by an external consultant. Hence

such methodologies may often appear as an act of imposing a dominant

logic on subordinate groups through either truncating alterative

scenarios or an ideological understanding of outcomes.

In addition, most organizations are frequently called upon to

spontaneously enact foresightful actions within the contingency of the

moment given the turbulent environment in which they are embedded.

Recognising this salient limit of foresight exercises in general, Burt and

Van der Heijden ([51], p. 1020) suggest that scenario planning exercises

should be an ‘ongoing way of thinking in the organisation about the

future, rather than just an episodic intervention’. Further, in stark

opposition to strategic foresight as an episodic process, Tsoukas and

Shepherd ([52], p. 10) argue that ‘foresightfulness’ only becomes an

organizational skill when future oriented thinking ceases to be

undertaken by experts and/or senior managers conducted at set times in

order to deal with something called ‘the future’. Elsewhere, Cunha et al.

[53] in adopting a critical view on strategic foresight exercises also argue

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persuasively that the highly uncertain, intensive and competitive

environments in which organizations find themselves requires the

cultivation of strategic foresight as an ongoing process of staying in tune

with their markets rather than as an episodic activity.

Recently, a major advance within the foresight literature has

redirected attention to theorising foresight as a social practice to

accommodate the advent of novelty, improvisation, and the potential for

change arising from ‘foresightful’ actions. This stream of studies

ontologically treats strategic foresight as flexible and perpetually

becoming [15] and argues that understanding the future requires us to

examine everyday organizing practices and micro-interactions between

organizational members [53-56]. Yet little is known about the creative

emergence of strategic foresight from within organizations (rather than

being externally directed), consequently we ask how is strategic foresight

enacted and reproduced within the everyday practice of organizational

actors. Temporally unfolding and permeating organizational life, we

argue that practices are constituted in language, everyday ‘doings’ and

ongoing interactions [57, 58], and hence have a genuine epistemological

relevance to strategic foresight. We therefore propose to draw on the

practice theoretical lens to ‘unpack’ strategic foresight in everyday

practice.

Strategic foresight as a social practice

The theory of practice is concerned with the taken-for-granted sense of

space and routines of actors as inscribed in the ways they enact their

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practice(s). It encompasses what Benner [59] (cited in [60], p. 426)

describes as a “rich socially embedded…. know-how that e ncompasses

perceptual skills, transitional understandings across time, and

understanding of the particular in relation to the general”. In simple

terms, it refers to what people do in their situated activities. Practices

can therefore be seen as permeating almost every part of social life. For

Schatzki ([57], p. 471), they are “organized human activities” made up of

“an organized, open-ended spatial-manifold of actions”. Placing emphasis

on actors’ actual activities in practice, what those activities are and how

these activities are enacted, Schatzki ([61], p. 90) argues that:

“Practices consist of both doings and sayings, suggesting that analysis must be concerned with both practical activity and its representations. Moreover we are given a helpful depiction of the components which form a ‘nexus’, the means through which doings and sayings hang together and can be said to be coordinated”.

Schatzki’s concept of ‘hanging together’, or “held-togetherness”

(Zusammenhang) ([61], p. 14), suggests a temporal interrelatedness

while activities also serve as a context within which other activities

occur. In making sense of ‘social activities’ underpinning the practice of

strategic foresight, the everyday activities that actors engage in to fulfil

their roles come together to form the nexus of the practice. These

activities are not to be understood as mere ‘building blocks’ of the

practice, enacted just for the sake of the practice; rather, their

enactment is goal oriented and based on the experience and intelligibility

of actors. The role of intelligibility brings to the fore the role of mental

phenomena in practice that Schatzki ([58], p. 49) refers to as desire,

hope, fear and anxiety or fundamental “states of affairs” that enable

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actors to cope with their involvement with the world. As such, and

expressed in behaviour, they inform activities by extending

understanding and determining what makes sense to people.

In addition to the human dimensions reserved for actors engaged in

practice, such as agency, propositional knowledge, skills intertwined with

perception, and goals, practice theory also identifies a role for non-

human entities, or artefacts, which by virtue of their mediating roles in

practice [62], contribute immensely to the mastering of a practice across

space and time. Following Salmon [63], artefacts in practice theory may

be understood to comprise linguistic, conceptual, cultural and material

entities such as physical tools (e.g. pens, paper etc), technical procedures

(e.g. methods for synthesising a chemical) and symbolic resources (e.g.

musical notations, chemical formula, logos, natural language etc).

In conceptualising strategic foresight as a social practice, it is

important to highlight two fundamental assumptions. First, we give

ontological priority to organisational members, their artefacts and those

regular discernible patterns of activities that take place within the ambit

of their praxis. Second, epistemological priority is placed on their quest

to understand the future of their complex technologies and business

environment and embodies capacities such as know-how and dispositions

that are centrally organised around shared skills and practical

understandings. Driven by these assumptions, we argue that strategic

foresight in practice is neither an attribute nor a trait; rather, it is

something that people do [17, 54]. Hence, we define strategic foresight

from a practice perspective as the bundles of human actions and

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organizing practices in context geared towards the creative evaluation

and reconfiguration of sources of potentialities into present and future

resources and productive outcomes. From this perspective, we argue that

strategic foresight is an ongoing social practice enacted on an everyday

basis in everyday organizing, sometimes with very little reflection, from

an unintended action to an unintended outcome. It continues unabated in

as much as relations may remain unexplained even when anomalies are

brought within the range of vision. The emergence of strategic foresight

in practice is flexible and relational in context.

Transcending the individual subject, the focus for developing a

meso-level, integrative theory of strategic foresight should be on

discernible coordinated patterns of collective actions and practical

activities [61], where primacy is placed not just on consciousness, but

also on internalised habits, skills and dispositions as well as reflexive

awareness in theorising the reproduction of strategic foresight [64, 65].

However, there may be fundamental concerns here pertaining to which

organizing activities constitute strategic foresight in practice. In framing

these issues, for a situated activity or praxis to be counted as partly

constitutive of strategic foresight, such knowledge based actions, we

argue, should: (a) directly or indirectly aim to provide a heuristic

interpretation of an anticipated future limits or potentialities; and, (b)

directly or indirectly provide some form of descriptive image of a

possible, probable and/or desirable organizational outcome. Only in this

way can we parse out how organisational actors apply their collective

knowledge and capabilities gained from their conscious individual

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experiences and collective psychic life, in a dynamic, generative way to

probe the unknown future.

A contextual practice of ‘way-finding’ into the future

As a collective shared practice that permeates everyday ‘doings’,

the enactment and engagement of strategic foresight in practice will, we

concur, manifest as a practice of ‘way-finding’ into the unknown future.

Driven by collective anticipation, imagination, expected consequences

and attractive outcomes, we argue that the coming to presence of

strategic foresight as practice is likely to be perpetually idiosyncratic,

amorphous and non-linear in form and character [66]. In this regard, its

emergence is likely to be reliant on the interdependence of social agents

confronted with the challenge of imputing meaningful order upon their

social relations.

Since practice is constituted over time through inculcating

collective know-how embodied within a community of practice, we can

only understand the practice of strategic foresight within the specific

context of its use in organisations – to understand the interaction and

interconnectivity between individuals and collectivities and to explicate

how social structures and actions are constituted. Strategic foresight is

a complex integrative practice embodied in a specific domain of social

life constituted as a social collective practice through the schemata,

expectations and dispositions of individuals in their everyday activities.

These everyday activities provide the elements of strategic foresight and

constitute dispersed practices – such as imagining. Recognising strategic

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foresight as an integrative practice, we propose a framework that

provides a conceptual mechanism for integrating perspectives at the

macro, meso, and micro levels by providing a more comprehensive

theoretical underpinning of the interactions across and within these

levels.

In our effort to show how the practice may temporarily unfold as a

contextual practice of ‘way-finding’ (P-WF) into the future, we

conceptually ‘unpack’ strategic foresight into four distinct phases that

are clearly discernible as unique in character and purpose (see figure 1).

We call the first prospective sense-making that is driven by individual

disciplined imaginations induced by serendipitous events or a problem

driven search during organizing. Second, multilateral participation

involves perceptually guided conversations about potential alternative

and competing future pathways – or creating social structures or

collectivities. Third is the application of analytical foresight techniques to

creatively explore and evaluate of alternative and competing possibilities

and limits of different pathways into the future – in essence objectifying

and codifying possibilities. Fourth, cooperation and practical judgement

involves negotiating and choosing among alternative pathways into the

future.

Figure 2- Strategic foresight as a contextual process of ‘way finding’

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These ‘durationally’ indivisible phases are serially driven by

ongoing strategic conversations and reflexivity-in-practice, which

together, help preserve the learning orientation of the practice [37, 66].

By strategic conversation, we refer to those interactions between and

among organisational members in their everyday situated activities that

go beyond mere information exchange to focus developing compelling

images of the future [46]. However, the sustenance of such conversations

requires reflexivity-in-practice [67]. Reflexivity-in-practice concerns

intelligibly challenging those constraints imposed by social structures

and individuals’ taken-for-granted assumptions about reality. Reflexivity-

in-practice as used here refers to the ongoing collective, deliberate and

conscious locally reflexive orders of actions engaged in by organizational

members that underpin the perception, reproduction and transformation

of their social structures. In this regard, engaging in reflexivity-in-

practice is not an aim in itself, but rather a consequence of taking a ‘step

back’ from technical rationality to question and challenge intelligibly

everyday ‘doings’, routine actions and collective assumptions about the

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Prospective sense-makingMultilateral participationApplication of futures methodolog-ies

Cooperation & practical judgement

Reflexivity-in-

practice

Strategic conversati

ons

world [66-68]. These may be transmitted among organizational members

in the form of bodily doings, interactions and precepts that over time

become part and parcel of the team’s taken-for-granted culture of

enacting, evaluating, and reconstructing temporal structures. As noted

earlier, the various phases, while distinct in character (figure1), are

nevertheless interwoven and interdependent. The durée of the everyday

actions and micro-interactions that come to define the various phases are

therefore connected across different time levels of the past, present and

future.

The phases presented in the framework, and discussed below, are

not only individually adaptive but also reveal a logical strategic

connectedness that serves to preserve the requisite feedback

mechanisms that sustain the becoming character of strategic foresight.

In practice, the phases may be identified as praxiological instantiations

with reference to the sayings and doings of the collective engaged in

their situated practice. In our conception of strategic foresight as

practice our framework acknowledges the central role of emergence –

that the social structures of strategic foresight are constituted from the

actions and meanings of participants that requires attention to the

dispositions and beliefs of individuals. This is captured in the first of our

phases – prospective sense-making.

P-WF1: Prospective sense-making

The emergence of strategic foresight in organizations, we argue, often

starts with what we refer to as prospective sense-making. Whereas

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sense-making is a social process of identifying and interpreting

contextual subtle cues to form salient categories that can be used to

inform action and sustain meanings and identities [31, 69], prospective

sense-making not only relies on past experiences (retrospection), but

importantly is driven by future expectations [70]. This is because the past

is not only used to gain insight into the present, but is extrapolated into

the future with the aim of charting desirable future pathways. A

constituent part of this phase is the purpose of artefacts in strategic

foresight. In examining the role of artefacts in strategic foresight we

argue that artefacts cannot be seen as objects in isolation, rather we

conceptualise them as constituted by individuals in the process of

enacting strategic foresight. Artefacts are constituted by individuals but

they also contribute to creating social learning about strategic foresight

as an emergent practice. Thus the tools and processes, that may include

minutiae such as post-it notes, diagrams, or doodles, become the

manifestation of thinking and serve to constitute the collective

knowledge of the practice. They act as signals, memory aids, and visual

stimulants that help shape the emergence of future understanding in a

process of becoming.

The enactment of prospective sense-making is often an automatic

response to making sense of the evolving tensions between problem

definition and an ongoing attempt by actors to gain insight through

middle level abstraction across space and time. In articulating how they

make sense of complex situations, actors implicitly rely on their

experiential and inferential knowledge and treat time as a stream, by

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employing both hindsight in the form of counterfactual reasoning and

foresight to probe and gain insight into the present [71, 72]. Recurrent

patterns of schemas that result from these individual cognitive activities

could be interpreted as a temporal, recursive and creative restructuring

of existing social formation.

While sense-making under an episodic strategic foresight paradigm

relies explicitly on asking actors to think ‘hard’ about their desired

future, prospective sense-making, we argue, is not centrally guided or

explicitly set in motion by a facilitator as part of an episodic ‘futures’

event, rather its emergence and final determination is a function of a

series of interlocking contextual actions and micro activities in which

actors engage. The actual starting point may elude systematisation, but

the immanent emergence of the process is often an improvised response

to specific pattern recognition or projection often triggered by a problem-

driven search or a serendipitous event. In this particular phase, actors

may gather information on strong or weak signals, identify focal issues,

develop their own stories and evaluate their own assumptions on

imagined futures. They may do this by bringing into existence

intransitive social structures and events that simultaneously enable and

constrain their actions in the present. Individual interpretation and

constructs of possible futures may then trigger the construction of

scenario narratives that may be brought to the group’s attention.

P-WF2: Multilateral participation

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Multilateral participation is a perceptually guided process propelled by

disciplined imaginations to bring possible futures into existence. It

therefore provides a platform for the evaluation of ideas appearing as

sensory images and the anticipated differential consequences of

alternative and competing visions of the future. In this way, it acts as a

forum for actors to share their anxieties, hopes, fears, and vague mental

conceptualizations of their future expectations. The intensity of these

free discussions may depend on the extent to which the narrative

challenges existing assumptions and mental models of the collective

engaged in a given enterprise, the novelty or disruptive nature of the

idea and its anticipated impact.

While an anticipated future impact may constrain the feasibility or

durability of an idealized vision, ensuing debates would be future

directed, open ended, efficacious and driven by what can be described as

cultural presuppositions and a mutually beneficial social interaction;

which in turn serves as a dynamic medium through which actors’ actions

and alternative ‘visions’ may come to presence. The potential recurrent

inter-simulations and responses characterizing the presentation of ideas

or points-of-view would not just be about individuals taking their turn to

speak or share their thoughts. Rather, proponents articulate succinct

explanations, justifications, and possible implications of their ideas

regarding the future. It is all about temporal structuring and the

restructuring of dispositions – that is, constructing narratives capable of

improving the team’s collective practice and existing social order. While

these open discussions may provide a means for teams to creatively

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synthesize what may sometimes appear to be unrelated, competing and

critical ideas into coherent versions of an emerging desirable future, it is

important to note that individuals’ vested interests, particularities, and

political orientations may influence their views and hence the emergence

of resultant counter ideas and arguments for consideration. It is at this

point the notion of emergence at the intersection between individual

actions and meanings on the one hand and the social structures that they

constitute on the other, come into play as a recursive, reflexive iteration.

In order to produce an idealized outcome, the actors may then move to

the next phase, where the limits and effectiveness of identified

possibilities in the form of propositions and conjectures are re-

contextualized, ‘tested’ and evaluated to ascertain their viability in

practice.

P-WF3: Application of analytical foresight techniques

During this phase, time and effort are devoted to applying ‘foresight’

techniques to the identified limits and potentialities generated during the

multilateral participation session. This resembles a live ‘wind-tunnelling’

[46] of the range of plausible scenarios and imaginatively re-organizing

all perceived consequences into factual, relevant, and future-oriented

‘knowledge about the anticipated consequences of different actions’

([34], p. 73). Under the auspices of the episodic paradigm, MacKay and

McKiernan ([73], p. 97) describe this phase as a ‘formal testing for

surprise, plausibility, internal consistency and gestalt’ of scenario logics

by extrapolating the past and the future into the present. The choice of

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techniques for evaluating potentialities and limits may be reached

through brainstorming sessions. While historiography in the form of

counterfactuals and scenarios in the form of statistics may be symptoms

of the mental and interpretive schemes of organizational members, the

methods likely to be employed would be qualitative in nature. For

example, potential limits and possibilities may be evaluated using case

probabilities and other informal ‘simple low-hazard technologies’ (Weick,

[31], p. 376), such as counterfactual analysis. The dynamics of the

selection process and the declaration of a new future is what actually

underlies and defines the next phase of the process. However, what

differentiates our third phase from the paradigm of foresight as episodic

intervention is that the foresight ‘exercises’ are embedded within and

emergent from internally derived practices. As such we propose this

phase should lead to a better integration of strategic foresight within an

organization, as it is emergent of practices from within that organisation.

P-WF4: Cooperation and practical judgement

Cooperation and practical judgement is the final phase of the process. In

reality, it is a momentary stage in an adventure rather than a destination,

and entails organizational members coming to a consensus by making

practical judgement on a chosen pathway among the numerous

alternatives at their disposal. At this stage, a new pathway to the future

is decided, declared and adopted. The declaration of the new future

empowers the collective allocation of resources. This phase enables the

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effective clarification and articulation of purpose. Practically, it is that

which makes the enactment of foresightful action possible.

Notably, the adopted pathway may become legitimized and

homogenized at this phase, enabling organizational members to generate

a shared interpretation and probably a common language.

Notwithstanding, this is the very point where differences in opinions and

differential images of the future may become pronounced. The

interesting thing about this phase is that it does not produce what could

be termed an authentic closure. This is because, in embarking on the

desired pathway, a new future is then said to be declared, which comes

to presence with new limits and potentialities. This may happen because

the desired future is not yet determined at this stage, and as such will

remain open and provoke strategic conversations capable of starting a

causal chain until a particular possibility is actualized. Thus, strategic

foresight never entirely comes to equilibrium, even if it begun with an a

priori program of desired change.

Implications and conclusion

This paper started from the premise that strategic foresight as an

exercise developed and promoted by scholars and management

consultants, is one that privileges a sequential, linear process with a

definite end point, as opposed to an ongoing flexible organizational

practice that comes to presence in everyday organizing. Our objective,

therefore, is to move beyond the episodic paradigm to present an account

of how the practice may temporarily emerge in organizations. Drawing

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on a practice lens, we delineate strategic foresight as an everyday

practice played out in the everyday organizing activities of organizational

actors. Although a theoretical treatment we develop what we call a

contextual practice of ‘way-finding’ framework (labelled as prospective

sense-making, multilateral participation, application of futures

methodologies, and cooperation and practical judgement). The intention

is to extend our understanding on how strategic foresight may emerge in

an organization in a process of becoming that will enmesh it more fully in

the working practices, routines and culture of an organisation – and

hence this organic emergence reifies praxis in contrast to external,

episodic interventions.

We show that the logical accountability of strategic foresight in

practice resides in continuous social interactions and inflexions. In so

doing, we seek to provide a new perspective that extends our

understanding of strategic foresight in organizations. The new paradigm,

as advanced in this paper, makes no attempt to replace or invalidate the

old one; rather, it complements the first by seeking cumulatively to

enrich our understanding of how strategic foresight in practice may be

‘constituted, reproduced, adapted and defined through ongoing

processes’ ([74], p. 271). Our four-phase framework provides a useful

mechanism for framing the vast research in the field of strategic

foresight but also serves to remind researchers of how their contribution

links to the whole.

Taking a practice theoretical lens, our research contributes to the

existing literature on strategic foresight and the more recent emerging

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literature on that has redirected attention to theorizing strategic

foresight as a social practice [32, 53-55] by explicating how strategic

foresight in the form of strategizing emerges organically from within the

organization - a crucial lens that still remains under-researched. From

this perspective, the key contribution of this paper lies providing an

alternative to the rationalistic interpretation of strategic foresight that

has come to dominate foresight studies, in addition to focusing attention

on the scholarly neglect of new and imaginative ways of organizing

strategic foresight. Furthermore, in our organizing world where the

trans-individual ‘foresightful’ actions of the ‘heroic CEO’ and ‘doings’ of

Top Management Teams are frequently treated as the ontological site for

the emergence of organizational foresight [75, 76], our research

transcends established theoretical boundaries to provide insight into how

the legitimation of everyday organizing practices of ‘ordinary’

organizational members often positioned further down the organizational

hierarchy may contribute to strategic foresight.

Furthermore, our attempt to delineate strategic foresight as a

social practice involves an act of creative imagination that may prove a

useful diagnostic tool for unpacking the foresightful state of

organizations and opens potential ways in which strategic foresight could

be reinvigorated and cultivated in practice. Our organizing framework

also highlight potential opportunities for further theoretical and

empirical inquiry into organizing practices that has the potential to

impede the creative emergence of strategic foresight in everyday

organizing. While further theoretical work may be needed to align the

24

framework to specific environmental contexts, future research could go

further to explicate and investigate prevailing organizing practices that

have the potential to enable (or constrain) the emergence of strategic

foresight in strategic groups, such as innovation teams, whose actions

can have a significant and direct impact on sustainable value creation

and capture. Our idea of strategic foresight suggests a more dynamic

organisational practice but one which we know relatively little about.

Hence we advocate attention in future research to understanding the

underlying processes through which managers can improve their actions

to inculcate strategic foresight within their organizations.

For the moment, we do not expect the relinquishing of episodic

interventions; however, we believe our contribution could help both

foresight scholars and practitioners to better understand the logic and

dynamics of strategic foresight beyond specific context of their temporal

emergence.

25

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