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FUTURESFutures 38 (2006) 942–955

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Fear of foresight: Knowledge and ignorancein organizational foresight

Miguel Pina e Cunhaa,�, Patrıcia Palmab, Nuno Guimaraes da Costaa

aFaculdade de Economia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Rua Marques de Fronteira, 20 1099-038 Lisboa, PortugalbInstituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Rua Jardim do Tabaco, 34 1149-041 Lisboa, Portugal

Available online 19 April 2006

Abstract

We discuss the changes occurring in the field of organizational foresight. The analysis results from

viewing foresight from two different perspectives: as centered on the future or on the present; as

macroscopic analysis or microscopic practice. The combination of these factors results in four

different modes of organizational foresight: strategic planning, visioning, scenario thinking and

planned emergence. These different perspectives are examined. We contribute to the literature by

presenting foresight as a complex process, amenable to different understandings. Foresight is often

portrayed as a technical and analytic process. We discuss it as a human process permeated by a

dialectic between the need to know and the fear of knowing.

r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

In one of his writings, the eminent psychologist Abraham H. Maslow remarked that‘‘From our point of view, Freud’s greatest discovery is that the great cause of muchpsychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one’s emotions, impulses,memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny. We have discovered that fear ofknowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel to fear of the outsideworld. That is, inner problems and outer problems tend to be deeply similar and to berelated to each other.’’ [38, p. 71, italics in the original]. In this paper, we approach therelationship between the need to know and the fear of knowing of decision makers in the

see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

.futures.2005.12.015

nding author. Tel.: +351 212 822 725; fax: +351 213 873 973.

dresses: mpc@fe.unl.pt (M.P. e Cunha), patricia.palma@ispa.pt (P. Palma),

sta@yahoo.com (N.G. da Costa).

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organizational foresight process. We regard foresight as a human process that is neitherneutral nor purely technical. In other words, foresight cannot be taken only as technique,but as a social practice that confronts managers with the limits of their knowledge.

Foresight triggers the fear of ‘‘engaging with the outside, and fear of the future’’[6, p. 1019]. To avoid this ‘‘confrontation’’ with reality, managers often isolate themselves,perhaps inadvertently, from the ‘‘real world’’, building a ‘‘splendid isolation’’ that protectsthem from the uncertainties and ambiguities of the outside world [32]. That is why, as Pantand Starbuck put it [46, p. 435], ‘‘using forecast (y) takes patience and courage.Researchers need patience to wait for events to catch up with their predictions. They alsoneed courage, because forecasting has often shredded forecasters’ illusions of under-standing.’’ Patience and courage may also be required in many other future-relatedactivities, such as strategic planning and business development, activities which force theorganization to look beyond the comfort zone. As such, our focus on foresight does notpreclude this dialectic between the need to know and the fear of knowing in otherorganizational activities as well.

The difference between the technical and social perspectives of foresight has manyparallels in the organizational literature. As several authors have remarked [66,71], there isa difference between organization and organizing, between strategy and strategizing [31].Organization refers to structures that are stable because they are already made. Organizingrefers to a process that is ongoing and never completed. However, because the sensiblereality is too concrete to be entirely managed, managers and researchers alike need toabstract it in order to make thinking and acting upon it viable [66]. There is, however, asignificant difference between the macroscopic view of organizations as usually portrayedin the literature and the microscopic experience of individual practice in organizations.This difference can be detected in the organizational foresight literature.

We discuss the dialectics of management knowledge involved in the foresight process: onthe one hand, managers need to know. They need to know themselves, their organizationsand the business environment. This involves a search for relevant, oftentimes dissonantinformation. Moreover, they need to show that they are knowledgeable. On the otherhand, they feel the fear of knowing. Forward-looking knowing threatens the comfortarising from established routines and dominant logics. It disrupts modes of thinking andthe security of exploitative learning. Returning to Maslow: ‘‘It seems quite clear that theneed to know, if we are to understand it well, must be integrated with the fear of knowing,with anxiety, with needs for safety and security. We wind up with a dialectical back andforth relationship which is simultaneously a struggle between fear and courage. All thosepsychological and social factors that increase fear will cut our impulse to know; all factorsthat permit courage, freedom and boldness will thereby also free our need to know.’’ [38, p.78]. When people in organizations delight themselves with current knowledge and expertiseat the cost of developing new knowledge, they risk the survival of the system. Such a riskfacilitates the search for both exploration and exploitation [37].

The organizational foresight process offers an adequate ground to analyze the dialectical‘‘back and forth relationship’’ which involves the need to know and the fear of knowing.The foresight process may take many shapes, and managers may select one of these shapesin order to cope with the dialectical tension without actually ‘‘solving’’ it [9]. The firstchoice they have to make is between taking foresight as thinking or as acting. Becauseforesight refers to the need to know, managers use it to build a macroscopic view of theworld. They are aware, however, of the fact that these macroscopic views are comprised of

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microscopic realities that emerge from interaction. It is at the microscopic level that thefear of knowing is expressed, when individual managers and workers try to make sense ofthe endless chains of microbehaviors which constitute the emerging macro organization[63]. Hence, managers may need to view foresight as microscoping: managing is aboutshaping the micro to constitute the macro.With the previous goals in mind, we have organized the paper as follows. We start with

the distinction of foresight as thinking and as practice. We believe this is an importantdistinction because the first representation portrays foresight as an elitist project restrictedto the top management team, while the latter views it as a permanent, ongoing andcollective project. Next, we discuss foresight as macroscoping and as microscoping, i.e. asdealing with the broad context or with day-to-day activity, focused on the present orlooking at the future. Finally, we put these dimensions together and build a typology ofpossible modes of foresight.The paper contributes to the organizational foresight literature in several ways.

Foresight is often portrayed as a technical, rational process. Here, we discuss it as a humanprocess permeated by the Maslowian dialectic between the need to know and the fear ofknowing. The latter may include the fear of knowing that what we know about the futurewill not actually come to pass, this being the paradox of foresight: the knowledge of futuresthat will never happen. It shows how strategy and practice can be articulated, thuscontributing to the strategy-as-practice literature. We argue that foresight is not onlyrelevant for imagining or anticipating possible futures but, most important, for thepurpose of acting upon the present and creating the future as the present unfolds. Finally,we indicate that strategic foresight is a field undergoing a significant change. The paperexplores these changes and extracts some implications for the academy as well as for thefield of practice.

2. Foresight: thinking or acting?

The desire for the anticipation of possible futures may be thought of as a process fordealing with the uncertainty of the present. Managers need to think about the future inorder to make sense of the present. As pointed out by Tsoukas, ‘‘management ishistorically taken to be about effecting and managing closure: buffering the organizationso that uncertainty is minimized’’ [65, p. 263]. While acting, managers adjust predictions torealities and, consequently, constantly make new predictions in their permanent strugglewith uncertainty. In this sense, organizations act on the present in order to make sense ofpossible futures. Both possibilities, i.e. thinking precedes action (one of the foundations ofmanagerial rationality) or action facilitates thinking, have been explored in the literature.Below, we elaborate on these two lines of thought.Traditionally, organizational foresight has been thought of as referring to anticipation.

It dealt with the analysis of the broad structure of an organization’s environment by its topmanagers. To scan their environments, managers were expected to use the formalapparatus of strategic planning, leading to complex strategic plans. This corresponds toFayol’s view on the role of the manager, starting with the need to plan [20]. In this sense,foresight may be discussed from an organizational cognition perspective. It comes aboutthrough analysis and, in the most sophisticated cases, from a formal point of view, with theuse of complex statistical tools.

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Organizational forecasters have learned, however, that foresight techniques will nevermake it possible to predict the future. As organizational environments move to ahypercompetitive state [64] they look less like stable structures and more like theentrepreneurial processes described by Austrian economists [30,50]. In this world ofhypercompetition and complex interactions, action may stimulate reflection and facilitatesensemaking; alternatively, these processes may occur in tandem, as occurs in the case ofimprovisational behavior. Improvisation and sensemaking, thus, are not eruptions ofirrationality, but co-evolutionary adaptations to high-speed environments [13]. Interest-ingly, however, they are based upon action, and not so much on pure reflection.

Given the changes in the nature of competition, it is necessary to recognize the limits ofanticipation and to prepare the organization to tackle the unexpected, often minor, eventsthat go unnoticed in macroscopic foresight processes [66]. It is the accumulation ofmicroscopic emergent actions that ‘‘makes’’ the future organization. To some extent, then,strategy is the result of practices that go on in the organization’s ‘‘shadow system’’ [58].One practice occurring in the ‘‘shadow’’ is improvisation, a liminal behavior that takesplace in the formal and informal organization simultaneously [14,67]: it is both an act oforganizational commitment and a deviation from the established system. Thinking andpractice, macro and micro, foresight and improvisation are complementary processes,multiple sides of a single reality. However, a great deal of attention has been devoted to thestrategy/macro/foresight part of organizational functioning, while the practice/micro/improvisation processes have gone relatively unstudied. Strategic studies often haveassumed that managers have accurate perceptions of their environments, a claim that maybe more desire than reality [59,60]. To understand strategy it is then possible to considertwo different representations of it: the macro organizational strategy and themicroprocesses of strategizing. We start with the macro representation.

3. Foresight as macroscoping

Managers need to know. They need to know the business and the organization, and howthe two fit together. Managers coordinate the elaboration of strategic plans, imaginevisions, craft strategies and implement them. They are the heroes of the organizationalsociety because they are knowledgeable about the business. Organizational foresight hastypically been presented as a fundamental knowledge tool for competent managers. That iswhy companies have invested in forecasting techniques, with their mathematically basedtools aimed at discovering the future and helping managers to make informed strategicdecisions [15]. With rigorous mathematical analyses, decision makers would be able toanticipate the shape of things to come.

We now know all too well that regardless of the sophistication of techniques, the futureis a mystery. This explains why companies that are usually very careful about the future,such as oil firms, have downsized their armies of strategic planners [24] and are developingmodes of strategic thinking conducive to planned emergence. In short, it is now clear thatstrategic planning is not very effective in predicting the future and that it does not show aconsistent correlation with financial performance. Boyd’s meta-analytical study led theauthor to qualify the relationship as weak [2].

Despite the difficulties, foresight is still relevant. It helps organizations in thedevelopment of a macroscopic perspective. To plan, organizations need to develop anoverall view of themselves and their environments. This may break routines and habitual

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modes of action and facilitate critical thinking about organizational practices andassumptions. Foresight, in the form of scenario thinking, for example, may limit thepossibility of inattentional blindness [56], a cognitive bias which tends to occur whenpeople are too absorbed in a given task. Scenario thinking may divert people from fallinginto this cognitive effect by facilitating a change of perspective.Foresight can be viewed as macroscoping in the sense that it aims to give the

organization a broad picture of the environment. Organizations need to develop a deepunderstanding of their environments if they aim to co-evolve with them. In this sense, itmay be excessive to speak about the demise of planning [42]. Strategic foresight may be asnecessary today as it was in the golden days of long-range planning—or maybe more.What changed, therefore, is not the need for foresight but the nature of it [24]. Strategicplanning may be changing from a detached, analytical, prediction-oriented endeavor, to adynamic process that combines a vision of the future, the collection and interpretation ofextensive information on a real-time basis, and a combination of top-down and bottom-upprocesses. Time horizons have become shorter and instead of considering long-termhorizons (4–5 years), organizations try to develop a more appreciative understanding oftheir current environment and its likely evolution. To do so, the most successfulorganizations avoid two types of information [17]: information that lags behind therealities of the business (e.g. accounting-based data) and predictions of the future (becausethey tend to be wrong). This finding is consistent with Ocasio’s position that non-financialindicators may provide a better insight into the unfolding future than financial indicators,which reflect past achievements [44].Eisenhardt’s work suggests that the less successful companies are those that make use of

future-trend projections and that separate the future from the present [17]. This evidencesuggests that strategic foresight may be an ongoing process of staying in tune with themarket, rather than an episodic activity. The organizations that master the practice ofmacroscoping in hotly competitive environments are those that have understood thefutility of purely analytical strategic planning exercises and that are able to combine anattraction for rigorous information (both internal and external) with the development ofcollective intuition through information sharing, open communication and the cultivationof a diversity of perspectives and rapid action [3,17]. Having discussed strategy at the levelof the organization, we now turn to its micro, constituent processes.

4. Foresight as microscoping

The need to study organizational processes taking place at the microlevel has beendefended by Tsoukas and Chia as follows: ‘‘organization scientists need to give theoreticalpriority to microscopic change. (y) such change occurs naturally, incrementally, andinexorably through ‘creep’, ‘slippage’, and ‘drift’, as well as natural ‘spread’. It is subtle,agglomerative, often subterranean, heterogeneous, and often surprising. It spreads like apatch of oil. Microscopic change takes place by adaptation, variations, restless expansion,and opportunistic conquests. Microscopic change reflects the actual becoming of things’’[66, p.580, italics in the original]. When we consider the microscopic world of organization,a picture emerges that is quite different from the ordered macroscopic view. Below, weconsider two microanalyses: the managers’ job and organizational routines. These arehelpful for understanding the nature of foresight because they provide the context wherestrategies are articulated.

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From a micropoint of view, managers are often prisoners of their busy jobs. They areoften ‘‘managed’’ by the job [22]. That is why it is important to know the strategists inorder to understand the strategy [21,57]. Looking at strategy as a human process helps toshow that managers make mistakes, develop inaccurate perceptions of the business [39]and rely on tried and tested solutions in situations for which those solutions are actuallyinvalid [21]. They need to know but sometimes resist knowing: ‘‘managers tend to ignore orpostpone problems that require reflection, systematic planning, or creative thinking, andfor which there is no external pressure for immediate action’’ [22, p. 183]. Instead ofacknowledging the need for change, they may insist on doing their routine tasks. Theyembrace what Ghoshal and Bruch called defensive avoidance, perpetuating accustomedpatterns of thinking and acting [22,23]. These are refined and improved over long periodsof time until they eventually prove themselves too far from the environment to be valid oradequate. This syndrome has been discussed by, among other authors, Danny Miller, whonamed it the Icarus paradox [40].

What is the relationship between these managerial cognitive processes and the practiceof organizational foresight? Managerial cognition affects organizational foresight effortsin the sense that believing is seeing. When burnt-out executives are unable to cope withchanges by putting energy into the search for new solutions, they are more interested inlegitimizing their choices, including their vision of the future that is founded on pastchoices, rather than in scanning the environment in search of novel solutions [22].

To understand foresight as microscoping we need to consider how the macroorganization, namely what becomes known as ‘‘the strategy’’, emerges from microinterac-tions. By taking strategy as strategic decision making, a new view of foresight emerges. It isno longer a cold, objective and neutral process, but rather a net of decisions made byagents that have a personal stake in the outcomes. The microinteractions between peopleare relevant for understanding foresight for two reasons: (1) the future of the organizationis the result of the many activities that take place everyday in an organizational setting; assuch, the fulfillment of the foreseen future depends upon microscopic behavior; (2) theforesight efforts of top managers are themselves influenced by microbehavioral aspects—asobserved by Eisenhardt and researchers on the dynamics of top management teams [17,61].The interactions between people have an impact on their understanding of foresight as wellas on how they interpret the meaning of ‘‘forecasting’’. After discussing the assumptionsunderlying organizational foresight, we now consider the practical consequences of theseassumptions. In the next section we offer a typology of foresight modes constructed on theprevious dimensions.

5. Foresight modes

To conceptually grasp the different approaches to foresight, we merge the two foresightassumptions discussed above, in order to create a typology of foresight modes. Theseassumptions are the following: (1) temporal focus on the present or the future, and (2)foresight as a macroscopic analysis or microscopic practice. With the combination of thesevariables, we obtain four interpretations on the nature of foresight: strategic planning,scenario thinking, visioning, and planned emergence. As depicted in Table 1, these modesemerged in the chronological sequence indicated here. Strategic planning occurs whenforesight is viewed as macroanalysis of the future rooted in analysis and rationality.Scenario thinking corresponds to the understanding of foresight as macro-analysis of the

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Table 1

Modes of organizational foresight

Macroscopic analysis Microscopic practice

Focus on the future Strategic planning Visioning

Inception: 1960s Inception: 1990s (first half)

Representative authors: Ansoff Representative authors: Collins & Porras

Central assumption:

forecasting is a distinctive

organizational ability based on

analysis and rationality

Central assumption: organizations should

build their future through a compelling vision

instead of trying to predict it

Focus on the present Scenario thinking Planned emergence

Inception: 1980s Inception: 1990s (second half)

Representative authors: Wack,

Van der Heijden

Representative authors: Brown & Eisenhardt,

Grant

Central assumption: it is not

possible to predict the future

but it is possible to represent

the likely evolution of key

uncertainties by means of

strategic conversations and

collective adaptive leaning

Central assumption: organizations may

combine high levels of adaptability with the

structure necessary to avoid chaos

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present based upon reflexivity and strategic conversation. Visioning refers to a view offoresight as the creation of the future through action. Finally, planned emergence refers tothe consideration of foresight as a practical exercise of letting the future emerge in a desireddirection, with the help of minimal structures.

5.1. Strategic planning

Strategic planning rests on the notions that planning is a technical process, that meaningis grounded in rationality and analysis, and that forecasting ability is a distinctiveorganizational capacity [36]. Hence the continued interest for forecasting ability [16].Strategic planning has several compatible objectives: (1) to predict what will happen in thefuture; (2) to create feelings of security by means of the management of psychologicaluncertainties resulting from the complexity of the outside world; (3) to legitimizemanagerial competence. Strategic planning can then be presented as a technology ofrationality, a routine made of meetings, presentations, analysis of numbers, and days away[8], and an organizational rain dance that fulfils a symbolic need [49]. The validity offorecasting tends to be limited by three sorts of factors: cognitive bias of decision makerswho tend towards optimism [33], organizational routines, and the organization’s dominantlogic, which may create blind spots and lead to escalating commitment [16,48].Emphasis on the value of strategic planning may be clearer in those organizations where

the CEO is perceived as the most important firm sensor [28], because it is in thesecompanies that strategic thinking is perceived as a prerogative of the CEO and its planningcrew. In these organizations, top decision makers are expected to think about the futureand to manage the organization according to forecasts. Employees are expected toimplement the strategy whose formulation has been alien to them. This top-down,

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mechanistic approach to strategic management, could be suitable for traditional industriesbut it does not seem adequate for contemporary knowledge-based organizations [1,25].The clear separation between planning, formulation and implementation may beunderstood as a waste of human capital and as a source of resistance: (1) plans can beresisted by those who are expected to implement them but have not participated in theirformulation; (2) their change may be resisted by those who formulated them because, forexample, of escalating commitment [51]. As discussed by Weick and Sutcliffe, people maytenaciously justify their prior actions and decisions, thereby carefully avoidingopportunities for learning [73].

In the strategic planning view of strategy, managers are ‘‘knowers’’: they tend to beportrayed as rational beings who deal with massive amounts of information. Theiranalytical efforts are often portrayed as fundamental for the prosperity of theorganization. The problem with this view is that this habitual representation of themanagers’ job as reflective and analytical, may be misleading. As observed by WernerKreuz, Vice-President at AT Kearney, while comparing family owned and publiccompanies, ‘‘Family owned companies tend not to think in terms of quarters when itcomes to investments and other strategic decisions.’’ [70, p. 8].

The difference between the prescriptive representation of the managers’ job and thedescription of managerial behavior [4,41] suggests that most managers do not conform tothe image of ‘‘cold’’ and analytical strategic planners frequently portrayed in thetraditional literature. A vocal attack on strategic planning was made by Hamel, whoargued that ‘‘strategic planning isn’t strategic’’ [26, p. 70]. This author qualifies it, on thecontrary, as ritualistic, reductionist, extrapolative, elitist and easy. The managersportrayed in the prescriptive literature—people who know—are thus fundamentallydifferent from those in the descriptive literature—those whose hectic days protect themfrom the fear of knowing that their plans and predictions are sometimes fundamentallyflawed. It is this disarticulation between strategic thinking and organizational practice thatturns the planning process in many organizations into an exercise of inconsequence.

5.2. Scenario thinking

Scenarios may be viewed as processes of thinking through alternative stories about howan organization’s environment might evolve in the future. In its essence it is a sociallearning process, established around strategic conversations, reflexivity and adaptivelearning. With scenarios, managers are not trying to predict the future but are ratherlooking for a deeper understanding of the forces operating in the organization’senvironment. Scenarios can then be viewed as learning processes stimulated by possiblefutures solidly anchored in the present. Scenarios do not seek to predict futures but toenvisage how some present key variables may evolve to create the future. In this sense,scenario thinking fundamentally rests on macro-analysis. It aims to give leaders food forthought and to substantiate their strategic decisions with reflexivity. The reflexive ethos ofscenarios is captured by Van der Heijden et al. [68, p. 141] when pointing out that ‘‘inplanning and discussing different scenarios, it is the process that matters, not the storiesthat emerge’’ (italics in the original).

Scenarios may be valuable to the extent that they stimulate a deep appreciation of thepresent and of how it might evolve into the future. One advantage of scenarios over plansis that scenarios are not confounded with the reality: they are experiments with the future

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and a product of informed imagination. They are not mathematical (i.e. scientific andtherefore credible) analyses. Scenarios will be useful if they trigger action and facilitatelearning. Otherwise, they will be nothing else than a variation on the need fororganizational ‘‘definiteness’’ [69].Like any other foresight approach, scenarios are not immune to human flaws and

cognitive limitations. MacKay and McKiernan, for example, discussed how the scenarioprocess may be affected by what they have called foresightful thinking flaws, i.e. ‘‘cognitivebiases and flawed logic that impede individual and organizational understanding ofstrategic context and thus constrain foresight’’ [35, p. 75]. In other words, scenarioplanning is vulnerable to the tension between the need to know how the future mightunfold, and the fear of knowing that it may not be consonant with current modes ofthinking. As a consequence, people may elicit expectancy-confirming evidence rather thandissonant, disconfirming information. This may cause the future to look like the pastrather than to diverge from it.

5.3. Visioning

Instead of seeing CEOs as the major firm sensors, they may be considered as the mostimportant influence for the sensing behavior of others. They can stimulate people to searchand sense the environment through the creation of powerful visions focused on the long-term future. As expressed by Collins and Porras, ‘‘companies need an audacious 10-to-30year goal to progress toward an envisioned future’’ [10, p. 73]. With visions, companiesestablish the strategic core that will endure and that creates the stability necessary to copewith change: ‘‘companies that enjoy enduring success have core values and a core purposethat remain fixed while their business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changingworld’’ [10, p. 65]. Collins and Porras defined a well-conceived vision as the combination ofa core ideology (What we stand for? Why we exist?) and an envisioned future (What do weaspire to become?).As such, the focus of visioning is the action of people in their daily organizational lives.

Moving visions may facilitate organizational renewal: they provide the safety and thecontinuity that are necessary to make change possible [73]. Hence, visioning can be viewedas microscopic practice with a future orientation. The change in the nature of work and oforganizational environments, stimulated some organizations to redefine their way ofworking. In professional, knowledge-intensive organizations, the work of leadership isbeing radically challenged. Leaders are no longer expected to have the answers but tofacilitate the inclusion and gain the cooperation of their followers [1]. Visions provide onepossibility for respecting people’s needs for autonomy while maintaining a shared goal andpurpose. These organizations accept that relevant knowledge is dispersed throughout theorganization and that the role of top management is no longer to act in a paternalistic andreassuring way, but rather to create a context in which human capital is valued anddeveloped [25].

5.4. Planned emergence

According to the empirical work of Eisenhardt, the most successful and innovativeorganizations in the highly turbulent computer industry, are those that operate a synthesisbetween organic and mechanistic structures [17]. They do not believe in the goodness of

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plans, but they also avoid the purely organic features that should characterize themaccording to classical theory [5]. These organizations facilitate planned emergence throughthe use of minimal structures, choreographed transitions and other processes that managethe articulation between the past, present and future [3,11]. Their strategic processesresemble Hamel’s ‘‘revolutionary’’ approach to strategy: inquisitive, expansive, prescient,inventive, inclusive and demanding [26].

The notion of foresight as planned emergence invites us to view it as a socially embeddedcompetence rather than as a ‘‘strategic tool’’, as practice rather than pure analysis [75,76].For planned emergence to occur, organizations need to combine: (1) an overall strategicdirection built by top management which must be permanently updated in terms ofrelevant information; (2) local information collected and processed by the ‘‘people on thespot’’, i.e. organizational members located where action takes place [27]. This combinationof freedom and direction facilitates organizational knowing, considered as an ongoingsocial accomplishment rather than as a static embedded capability [45]. It is thecombination of these organic and mechanistic features that makes it possible fororganizations to be adaptive and to express the levels of strategic flexibility that theliterature is presenting as an imperative in hypercompetitive industries, without lack ofcoordination.

The planned emergence perspective changes the view of strategy from analysis andtechnique to strategy as practice. Practitioners do not stand outside their situations inorder to survey their own action, and strategy is the result of responding to theenvironment on an ongoing basis. In this view of strategy as a process informed both bystrategic intention and local logic [34], the skillful strategist cannot be thought of as a‘‘pure thinker’’ or a rational analyst: he or she must be a vigilant sensor, and a skilledimproviser, able to cope with local problems as they emerge [7].

The four modes of foresight discussed in this section suggest a change in the nature ofthe strategic process, from a technical–rational episodic activity to a socially embedded,process-based and permanent competence. New strategic thinking retains a technicalorientation and a strong focus on information, but it complements this approach withmore flexibility and an action orientation. As Szulanski and Amin put it, strategists arenow attempting to balance discipline and imagination [62].

6. Conclusion

We traced changes in organizational foresight and concluded that the nature of foresightseems to be co-evolving with changes in the world of work and organizing. The need torethink the nature of strategy has been voiced in the last years by influential authors.Porter [47], for example, titled one of his papers ‘‘What is strategy?’’. Hamel invited hisreaders to view strategy as revolution [26]. Simultaneously, leading companies wereexperimenting with unorthodox strategic practices. 3M, for example, has been said to berewriting business planning through ‘‘strategic stories’’ [55]. Notions such as strategicentrepreneurship and opportunity grabbing are gaining relevance in the literature as newways of thinking about the dynamics of strategy [19,29]. In short, the story of strategy itselfis being rewritten. Strategy and strategic foresight are changing to incorporate both themicroscopic inputs of ‘‘people on the spot’’ and to develop a real-time sensitivity to themarket. As Whittington put it, strategy should be viewed as social practice or as‘‘something people do.’’ [77, p. 64]

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To articulate this change, some companies seem to be creating visions that clarifystrategic direction without hampering flexibility and, at the same time, developingmechanisms that facilitate the temporal convergence between planning and execu-tion, in order to increase the rapid capacity of response required in turbulent environ-ments [43]. This change can be briefly described as evolving in the direction of: (1) a shortertime horizon, and (2) a growing participation of people at all levels in the definitionof the strategic process as it unfolds, in order to facilitate sensemaking, peripheralvision and prompt action [72,74,78]. These changes may be promising because, asconcluded by previous research, people are more likely to notice recent events, largerchanges and more dramatic events, but they may have more accurate perceptionsof older changes, smaller changes and more prosaic events [39]. With the reorien-tation of strategy to a less elitist and more mundane activity, from analysis to inter-action [53], managerial perceptions may therefore become more accurate becausepeople will deal with events that they may easily understand, instead of focusing onpredictions of the future. The problem with the prediction is that ‘‘When it comes toforetelling the future, no one really has expertise’’ [46, p. 443]. The emergent foresightassumptions may be more adjusted to the limitations of human thinking than theprevious assumptions, which have been described as unrealistic and overly optimistic [52].The recent developments in the conceptualization of the strategic process seemtherefore to allow organizations to cultivate future adaptability without sacrificing currentadaptation [71].Given the basic human impulse to impose systematic order on lived experience

and to predict future courses of actions of events, organizational foresight can beviewed as a crucial organizational activity [7]. Managers have learned, however thatthere is an inherent fallibility in the prediction of the future: regardless of the sophi-stication of the forecasting tools they use, the future will be surprising in some sense [54].The result is that some organizations are apparently trying to complement the need toknow, with the recognition of the inevitability of ignorance as a starting point forovercoming blindspots with an attitude of constant appreciation of learning and newknowledge creation. The processes of planned emergence reported in the major oilcompanies constitute an adaptation to the need to combine top-down predictionand bottom-up adjustment to local and unexpected circumstances [24]. This repre-sents a qualitative change in the nature of foresight systems: they are becomingmore realistic and more complex by creating a tension between ex ante rationalityand real-time improvisation, between thinking and action, between the present andthe future [12]. Foresight systems, in sum, appear to be co-evolving with changes instrategy [18].New approaches to organizational foresight recognize the need to know while

acknowledging the fear of knowing. Because what people know may rapidly becomeoutdated. Adaptive organizations face the fear of knowing but accept that what they knowwill soon become inadequate. In other words, organizational knowledge has only atemporary validity. Because the validity of knowledge contained in plans becomes rapidlyobsolete, even before the plan is implemented, organizations may prefer to give priority tothe realities of the present rather than to the prediction of the future, through the creationof intelligent, rapid, distributed and flexible organizational processes operated by‘‘complex’’ rather than ‘‘simple’’ people. It is in this sense that the organization isbecoming the strategy rather than a result of strategy.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to George Burt, George Wright, the anonynmous reviewers, andparticipants in our session at the Second International Conference on OrganizationalForesight for their valuable comments and suggestions. This research is part of a projectfunded by a research grant from the Fundac- ao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (POCTI/GES/48967/2002).

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