By: Alireza Hejazi

An organization develops anticipatory prowess in order to gain strategic advantage. Meanwhile, being anticipatory requires sophisticated intelligence gathering techniques, new decision process models, and practical accountabilities.

          The real strategic consideration is whether change will befall your organization as a series of crisis, or, will you be able to use foresight and anticipation to manage change in a calm, informed and systematic manner? The anticipatory management decision process model is an outside-in intelligence flow chart that focuses on surfacing emerging issues and affords organizational leaders an opportunity to evaluate and make decisions visa-vis those issues in a timely manner.

          The first step in the anticipatory management process is to identify emerging issues that can affect the organization. The earlier we can identify emerging issues, the more options we will have. On the other hand, These tools may be used to identify emerging issues: scanning and monitoring processes, challenging assumptions, conducting issue vulnerability audits, and scenarios.

          Scanning identifies signals of change, monitoring follows these signals, and forecasting estimates the duration, direction, acceleration, and amplitude of the signals. We should remember that trends are descriptions of social, technological, economic, environmental, or political (STEEP) movements over time. On the other hand, events are developments that change the future when they occur. Trends and events converge to form issues.

          We also use implicit assumptions to form a paradigm. There are other tools that should come into account: A) Issue Vulnerability Audit is a kind of strategic thinking that forces managers to view trends through the eyes of both friendly and hostile stakeholders before the trends go critical. B) Scenarios are a hypothetical sequences of events constructed for the purpose of focusing attention on causal processes and decision points.  The purpose of the scenarios is to illuminate uncertainty. Scenario development is a way to think about issues and their causal processes, the manner in which they might develop.

          One of the most important tools that we should be equipped with is: Issue Briefs.  Issue Briefs contain: a) a statement of the focus of the issue; b) a discussion of its background; c) a description of the trends, driving forces, and stakeholders influencing it; d) a forecast describing its future prospects; and finally e) potential implications for the organization.

Another tool that should be reminded is performance evaluation. It is a review of how the action plan was implemented. It assesses how well objectives are attained and how stakeholders respond to the plan.

          And finally, the key elements of the Anticipatory Management Accountability Model can be summed up as: 1) Anticipatory Management Function; and 2) Steering Committee. Managers should be informed of Issue Management Process. It is composed of: a) Issues Maintenance; and b) Issues Monitoring.

          I hope that by summarizing these essential, I might be able to assist those who are interested in capturing a quick view from the important topic of anticipatory management.

Notes: William C. Ashley and James Morrison, ANTICIPATORY MANAGEMENT TOOLS FOR THE 21st CENTURY