Fear of foresight: knowledge and ignorance in organizational foresight

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.

[1]  Rodolphe Durand.  Predicting a firm's forecasting ability: The roles of organizational illusion of control and organizational attention , 2003 .

[2]  A. Maslow.  Toward a Psychology of Being , 1962 .

[3]  Robert Jacobson,et al.  The “Austrian” School of Strategy , 1992 .

[4]  James Brian Quinn,et al.  Managing Strategic Change , 1989 .

[5]  R. Bradley MacKay,et al.  Exploring strategy context with foresight , 2004 .

[6]  Tom R. Burns,et al.  The Management of Innovation. , 1963 .

[7]  Mie Augier,et al.  The economics of choice, change and organization : essays in memory of Richard M. Cyert , 2003 .

[8]  W. Ocasio.  The enactment of economic adversity: A reconciliation of theories of failure-induced change and threat-rigidity , 1993 .

[9]  M. K. D. Vries.  The leadership mystique , 1994 .

[10]  G. Huber,et al.  Firm and industry as determinants of executive perceptions of the environment , 1998 .

[11]  Henry Mintzberg.  The Nature of Managerial Work , 1974, Operational Research Quarterly (1970-1977).

[12]  S. Ghoshal,et al.  Reclaim your job. , 2004, Harvard business review.

[13]  Christine Moorman,et al.  The Convergence of Planning and Execution: Improvisation in New Product Development , 1998 .

[14]  Kathleen M. Eisenhardt,et al.  Strategy as Strategic Decision Making , 1999 .

[15]  David G. Sirmon,et al.  A Model of Strategic Entrepreneurship: The Construct and its Dimensions , 2003 .

[16]  Sydney Finkelstein,et al.  Why smart executives fail , 2005 .

[17]  D. Samra-Fredericks.  Strategizing as Lived Experience and Strategists' Everyday Efforts to Shape Strategic Direction , 2003 .

[18]  F. Hayek.  The economic nature of the firm: The use of knowledge in society , 1945 .

[19]  W. Bennis.  The end of leadership: Exemplary leadership is impossible without full inclusion, initiatives, and cooperation of followers , 1999 .

[20]  D. Pugh,et al.  Organization theory : selected readings , 1971 .

[21]  Gabriel Szulanski,et al.  Learning to Make Strategy: Balancing Discipline and Imagination , 2001 .

[22]  C. Prahalad.  The Blinders of Dominant Logic , 2004 .

[23]  R. Grant.  Strategic planning in a turbulent environment: evidence from the oil majors , 2003 .

[24]  J. Pennings.  Organizational strategy and change , 1985 .

[25]  P. Jarzabkowski.  Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation, and Practices-in-Use , 2004 .

[26]  C. Cooper,et al.  International review of industrial and organizational psychology , 1986 .

[27]  Mie Augier,et al.  The Economics of Choice, Change and Organization , 2002 .

[28]  George Wright,et al.  The Sixth Sense: Accelerating Organizational Learning with Scenarios , 2002 .

[29]  G. Day.  Analysis for Strategic Market Decisions , 1985 .

[30]  Miguel Pina e Cunha,et al.  Organizational improvisation and leadership: a field study in two computer-mediated settings , 2003 .

[31]  Richard Whittington,et al.  Strategy after modernism: recovering practice , 2004 .

[32]  S. Clegg,et al.  Management Paradoxes: A Relational View , 2002 .

[33]  S. Ghoshal,et al.  Strategy as guided evolution , 2000 .

[34]  G. Burt,et al.  First steps: towards purposeful activities in scenario thinking and future studies , 2003 .

[35]  William H. Starbuck,et al.  Innocents in the Forest: Forecasting and Research Methods , 1990 .

[36]  K. Eisenhardt,et al.  The Art of Continuous Change : Linking Complexity Theory and Time-Paced Evolution in Relentlessly Shifting Organizations , 1997 .

[37]  Gordon Walker,et al.  Identifying a distinctive competence: forecasting ability in the money fund industry , 2000 .

[38]  L. G. Thomas.  The Two Faces of Competition: Dynamic Resourcefulness and the Hypercompetitive Shift , 1996 .

[39]  K. Weick,et al.  Hospitals as Cultures of Entrapment: A Re-Analysis of the Bristol Royal Infirmary , 2003 .

[40]  K. Weick.  FROM SENSEMAKING IN ORGANIZATIONS , 2021, The New Economic Sociology.

[41]  J. March.  Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning , 1991, STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI.

[42]  R. Stacey.  Complexity and Creativity in Organizations , 1996 .

[43]  Robert Chia,et al.  On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change , 2002, Organ. Sci..

[44]  K. Weick.  The social psychology of organizing , 1969 .

[45]  Henry Mintzberg.  The rise and fall of strategic planning , 1993 .

[46]  John M. Mezias,et al.  Studying the Accuracy of Managers' Perceptions: A Research Odyssey , 2003 .

[47]  P. Bromiley,et al.  Strategic stories: how 3M is rewriting business planning. , 1998, Harvard business review.

[48]  S. Ghoshal,et al.  A Bias for Action , 2006 .

[49]  M. Porter.  What is strategy , 2000 .

[50]  C. Chabris,et al.  Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events , 1999, Perception.

[51]  G. Hamel,et al.  Strategy as revolution. , 1996, Harvard business review.

[52]  João Vieira da Cunha,et al.  Organizational improvisation and change: two syntheses and a filled gap , 2003 .

[53]  H. Tsoukas.  Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology , 2004 .

[54]  Elizabeth J. Van Every,et al.  The Emergent Organization : Communication As Its Site and Surface , 1999 .

[55]  Kathleen M. Eisenhardt,et al.  Austrian Insights on Strategic Organization: From Market Insights to Implications for Firms , 2003 .

[56]  Richard Whittington,et al.  Strategy as Practice , 1996 .

[57]  Bryan Love.  Manfred Kets de Vries: The Leadership Mystique – a users’ manual for the human enterprise. Prentice Hall, Great Britain. 2001. , 2002 .

[58]  L. Costanzo.  Strategic foresight in a high-speed environment , 2004 .

[59]  A. van Witteloostuijn,et al.  Companion to organizations , 2002 .

[60]  Dan Lovallo,et al.  Delusions of Success , 2003 .

[61]  Sidney G. Winter,et al.  Specialised Perception, Selection, and Strategic Surprise: Learning from the Moths and Bees , 2004 .

[62]  Wanda J. Orlikowski,et al.  Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing , 2002, STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI.

[63]  R. Whittington.  The Work of Strategizing and Organizing: For a Practice Perspective , 2003 .

[64]  Paul Jeffcutt,et al.  The Foundations of Management Knowledge , 2007 .

[65]  Haridimos Tsoukas,et al.  Managing the future : foresight in the knowledge economy , 2004 .

[66]  Barry M. Staw,et al.  Expo 86: An Escalation Prototype. , 1986 .

[67]  Kathleen M. Eisenhardt,et al.  Has Strategy Changed , 2002 .

[68]  Robert Chia,et al.  Strategy-as-practice: reflections on the research agenda , 2004, European Management Review.

[69]  Brian K. Boyd,et al.  STRATEGIC PLANNING AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE: A META‐ANALYTIC REVIEW* , 1991 .