Pathways to the Future: Linking Environmental Scanning to Strategic Management

In the last two decades, the environment of two-year colleges, like that of other types of educational organizations, may be best described as turbulent. The growing emphasis by federal and state governments on fiscal and educational accountability, the shifts in public opinion regarding the appropriate mission and role of postsecondary education, and the pervasive influence of the new emerging technologies throughout society are but a few of the environmental changes the two-year college must face as it moves into the future. The ability to analyze environmental change and formulate appropriate institutional strategies for successfully adapting to such change is critical for successful two-year college administrators. The effects of the general societal environment on the tasks of organizations is well documented in the literature of organizational analysis (Osborne & Hunt, 1974; Hall, 1977; Kast & Rosenzweig, 1979; Scott, 1981). Current contingency approaches to organizational theory have increasingly focused the attention of organizational analysts upon the role of environmental uncertainty and its perception by decision-makers in their formulation of organizational strategy (Anderson & Paine, 1975; Duncan, 1972; Lindsay & Rue, 1980; Boulton, Lindsay, Franklin & Rue, 1982). Bourgeois (1980) emphasized that an organization's primary strategy of domain selection involves a scanning of the general environment both for broad trends that affect the organization's mission and for the identification of new organizational tasks. Traditional educational planning processes are weak in facilitating the identification of critical trends and future events and assessing their impact on education. At best, most planning models assume their will be a "surprise-free" future in which present trends continue unabated and the interrelationship between and among social, economic, political, and technical forces remains essentially the same (Ziegler, 1972). We know that this is not true; environments are marked by rapid and unanticipated changes. What is needed is a model process that enables us to